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Legal Arguments Can Hurt Tech Job Mobility
camelcai writes "Microsoft's suit against Kai-Fu Lee and Google is based off of the thought that in some circumstances people can't avoid sharing or relying on trade secrets from their former employer when moving to a competitor. In MS's filing it says: 'Lee's conduct threatens to disclose or Lee inevitably will disclose Microsoft's trade secrets to Google and/or others for his and/or Google's financial gain in the course of working to improve Google search products that compete with Microsoft, and in the course of establishing and building Google's presence in China to compete with Microsoft's efforts in China.' According to CNET, thanks to this increasingly popular legal argument, defectors might face a lawsuit even if they did not sign agreements not to compete or not to disclose confidential information."
'Lee's conduct threatens to disclose or Lee inevitably will disclose Microsoft's trade secrets to Google and/or others for his and/or Google's financial gain in the course of working to improve Google search products that compete with Microsoft, and in the course of establishing and building Google's presence in China to compete with Microsoft's efforts in China.'
Can someone translate this please?
The old employer pays the person as much as the new employer was offering for a year (or however long the non-compete contract is) and puts up money equal to 10x that in case the new company doesn't want the employee after the year is up and he has to find a new job.
Anything less is indentured servitude (a form of slavery).
If the companies want to play that game, then they should be financially responsible.
This reminds me of that novel Jennifer Government, where in the dystopian anarcho-capitalist future, companies can sue former employees for losses in productivity which might result from an employee leaving their job.
Here, we have a company suing over potential losses in intellectual property which might result an employee leaving their job.
You tell me which is more surreal.
The future, is.... now?
May the Maths Be with you!
Intresting that MS decide that inevitable disclosure is a problem when their employees leave given that it wasnt an issue when they poached/bribed a lot of the guys from Borland in the .NET ramp up.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Maybe it should be law that if a company wants to bind you to a long non-disclosure, it should also be forced to agree to a golden-parachute clause as long as the non-disclosure?
Say you work in search engine technology for Microsoft, how are you going to earn a nice living elsewhere? Afterall your skill is searches and that's what people are willing to pay for. Well if your employer wants to prevent you from earning a decent living, it should pay for it!
I am sure that there is a flaw in that argument, and I understand Microsoft's position in the matter but in these circumstances doesn't it make the employee a virtual slave of the employer if he can't use his skills elswhere?
The Chinese government is the worst major government on Earth today. It's still a totalitarian government and an aggressive, would-be empire. It's amazing to me at times how much we are willing to do to build up their economy, only to have them eventually become a dominant military and trade empire in Asia, and possibly one day Europe as well.
When I think of how China treats the Tibetans and Uhigurs, I just can't believe that we let companies like Microsoft and Google trade with them. The scary part about this competition to build up their services in China is that regardless of which company wins, the Chinese government wins because its private and state-owned corporations get a much larger economy to profit from. That in turn goes into building up the military, which btw they are now making steady progress toward having a blue water navy in the pacific.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
I'm of the opinion that what is in your head is yours, and makes you what you are. As no one can own you, in part or in whole, they can't own what's in your head. They can only share in it. Your life experiences are your own, and no one elses.
Trade secrets must be acknowledged as temporary artifices at best. As the pirates say, two men can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.
= 9J =
I was sued for exactly that reason (knowledge of information, like customer names, what they bought, pricing, etc). When it came time for my lawyers to present my side of the case, the judge said to them: "You don't really want to waste the court's time with this, do you?" and threw the case out. I thought that was pretty cool, since I didn't have the $5 million I was being sued for and needed the job.
Employees at will can quit or be fired at any time, and there are a lot of precedents (esp in CA tech industy cases) that say that what's in your head is yours, unless you signed it away via non-disclosure agreements or employment contracts.
However, you can't take physical stuff with you (like code listings or customer lists) and you can't conspire with cow-orkers to leave en masse. (I did the latter but the employer's lawyer was too incompetent to prove it - they never thought to ask). And patent laws, copyrights and trade secret laws still apply.
Am I the only one reminded of the bad guy from snow crash who wanted to control the information in his programmers brains?
(I can't remember the names right now)
Lee's conduct threatens to disclose or Lee inevitably will disclose Microsoft's trade secrets to Google and/or others for his and/or Google's financial gain in the course of working to improve Google search products that compete with Microsoft, and in the course of establishing and building Google's presence in China to compete with Microsoft's efforts in China.
"Well then maybe you should've made him not want to leave."
I find it amusing that companies are allowed to fuck employees in the race for cheaper labor, but valuable employees [alledgedly] aren't allowed to fuck employers in the race for higher wages.
You don't just have to look to the future for this - you can look to the past also. What we see existing in potential here are similar to the medieval guilds. European guilds in the middle ages were very protective of their areas of expertise and raised Hell for outsiders who dared to compete (assuming they got access to the knowledge and skills they needed in the first place).
The modern view of the guilds tends to be very critical - they stopped people earning a living unless they were members?"
However, it's very similar to the situation that this would logically lead to - locked into a profession; and Heaven help you if you loose your place in the organization because with this sort of legal precedent, the threat of being sacked from a corporation becomes even more powerful.
For those who are interested in the guilds in history, it might be worth noting the following:
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Does Google really want to hire someone this stupid?
Alternatively, this sounds like a red herring on Microsoft's part. If they want to know what mail Dr. Lee received, just get it out of their Exchange servers. They probably don't want to admit that they already do this.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
When will this work? The next time the job market becomes tight in tech.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
1. Unions are bad for a free ecconomy as a whole.
2. We should have to use Unions. But now we have to because "Big Government" can't keep it's god damn hands out of a free ecconomy. In other words, Microsoft can go fuck themselves. This man is free and can walk anytime he wants. Hell, I will say he is free to what he learned from Microsoft and go else where.
But, this wont happen now that the legel system is so tied in with corporate activities.
Life is not for the lazy.
We've outsourced most of our manufacturing other countries, so now companies are going collectively insane trying to protect their brain share products whether it's music, movies, software or patentable ideas. This is just extending that protectionist mind set to the employees who think up the ideas.
It's insane. And I'm afraid we're going to wake up in the middle of an economic Pearl Harbor depending on sales of products with no substance.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The medical profession still maintains high wages in the US because of a perverse form of collective action: the medical guilds that prevent a bigger number of doctors to study at the universities (and the high cost of education too).
In the end, we are workers who sell their force of labor for a sallary. Dont come with the "innovation" argument because it's phony. We may dress like managers, not like the janitors; we may be called "middle class", we may work in offices instead of production lines; but the reality is that our place in the greater scheme of things is closer to the janitor and the workers than it is to the managers and big capitalists.
Historically, even with aaaall their flaws, unions and struggles (NOT elections!) have been the only way that workers have been able to defend their interests against the interests of the bosses.
But we techies believe that we are above that, we believe that we can solve everything individually. I have never in my life seen a group of developers demanding anything in the streets. This is just the beggining, they are already attacking us and we have our pants down.
Posting comments to a site is not an assembly. If you dont go out to the streets, anything that you do does not exist politically. That is if you are not one of the bosses or owners of the circus.
Our bosses are going to fuck us big (they have already started) and we have no way to defend ourselves.
Here, in front of the keyboard, we dont stand a chance; and that's exactly where we will stay as a group.
This happens all the time - you interview someplace and they, usually way out of site of the interviewee, find out about possible non-compete complications. If there are any, and I do mean any at all, there is no offer. Period.
Why would it work any other way? Is someone at Google just trying to spend thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to prove a point? Companies don't do this sort of thing unless there is a real reason behind it.
And no matter how good Lee is, he isn't worth this. There is another agenda here - and that is what the real story should be.