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Facebook Sued For Alleged Theft of Data Center Design
itwbennett writes British engineering company BladeRoom Group says it contacted Facebook in 2011 about using its technique, which involves constructing data centers in a modular fashion from pre-fabricated parts. What happened next isn't clear, since much of the public version of BRG's lawsuit is redacted. But it claims Facebook ended up stealing its ideas and using them to build part of a data center in Lulea, Sweden, that opened last year. 'Facebook's misdeeds might never have come to light had it decided that simply stealing BRG's intellectual property was enough,' the company said in its lawsuit, filed Monday at the federal district court in San Jose, California. "Instead, Facebook went further when it decided to encourage and induce others to use BRG's intellectual property though an initiative created by Facebook called the 'Open Compute Project.'"
How can you claim something is a trade secret if you show it to others? If you want to keep your design proprietary, patent it.
Or, show it to prospective customers/partners under a Non Disclosure Agreement. Like happens millions of times a year throughout most industries, and probably (I'd be very surprised to find otherwise) happened in this case.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Yeah, i mean, if you're going to effectively patent troll ...
TFA says nothing about patents. The lawsuit is over trade secrets and breach of contract. This clearly implies that a contract was signed between BRG and Facebook, and that as a result of that contract, BRG disclosed their trade secrets to Facebook. So the only thing that matters here is what does the contract say? Since we don't know that, commenting further on this issue is silly.