AMD Managers Copied Confidential Files Before Joining NVIDIA

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AMD claims that four former employees copied 100,000 confidential trade secret documents, files and information before taking jobs at NVIDIA. :eek:

Chipmaker AMD is taking four former employees to court, one former vice-president and three former managers from the firm's Boxborough plant, who left the company to go and work for rival Nvidia last year. AMD believes that as they left the company, the four employees copied more than 100,000 confidential documents and trade secrets to take with them.
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Not like AMD was beating out Nvidia anytime soon. They probably needed new 'trade secrets' anyhow.
 
The blurb says "AMD believes that as they left the company, the four employees copied more than 100,000 confidential documents and trade secrets to take with them."

In reality it is" AMD has hilariously detailed proof of the four employees copying more than 100,000 confidential documents and trade secrets to take with them and trying to erase their tracks."

Mitnick those four and have Nvidia respond in court with what those four worked on and contributed with.
 
You would think Nvidia would be hunting for better quality employees from rival companies. Better quality meaning employees technical enough to get away with something like that.
 
Tiburon1186 said:
Not like AMD was beating out Nvidia anytime soon. They probably needed new 'trade secrets' anyhow.
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An rational educated response.

On topic though, I hope these guys get it good. People are routinely punished harsher for much less.
 
First step should be to gather any and all e-mails exchanged between these individuals and Nvidia before they left AMD. Once you have motive the rest of the pieces fall into place pretty easily.
 
This is simply theft and wrong. However, has anyone else noticed a distinct pattern concerning Nvidia? This is not even close to the first time a new Nvidia employee has been accused of doing this.
 
Oooooo, I wonder if this is gonna turn into an ugly lawsuit.
Those guys are in big trouble.
 
"...four former employees copied 100,000 confidential trade secret documents..." are there no security measures in AMD?
 
Sounds like AMD needs to invest in endpoint DLP measures to prevent employees from removing files from their work computers.
 
Since this implies the workers took the information to give to Nvidia, I wonder how bad Nvidia is going to get raped in court.
 
These seemed to be high level employees which would have access to these documents normally. Bad, very bad....
 
serious said:
"...four former employees copied 100,000 confidential trade secret documents..." are there no security measures in AMD?
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Do you get a pat down every time you leave work? Flash drives are the bane of secretive companies.
 
Azhar said:
Do you get a pat down every time you leave work? Flash drives are the bane of secretive companies.
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Truth. And there are companies out there that sell endpoint data loss prevention software that disable the possibility of doing things like this.
 
ballistic90 said:
AMD does have some very lucrative contracts for next gen and current gen consoles.
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Not really lucrative if it's the same arrangement as with the Xbox etc. Where Microsoft paid for part of the research and then AMD sells them the design.
 
DeathPrincess said:
Not really lucrative if it's the same arrangement as with the Xbox etc. Where Microsoft paid for part of the research and then AMD sells them the design.
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Yea, the one-time payments didn't amount to much, but with the Nintendo Wii console they made money on royalties (each console sold) and it amounted to a big sum over the life of the console. If it's the latter, they could potentially have a pretty big sum of money depending on the sales figures and the arrangements with Sony, MS, and Nintendo.

As to the topic, this is pretty bad for both parties. nVidia ends up looking like tools for hiring AMD's former employees that (allegedly) stole sensitive information, and AMD looks more and more of a leaky ship.
 
pelo said:
Yea, the one-time payments didn't amount to much, but with the Nintendo Wii console they made money on royalties (each console sold) and it amounted to a big sum over the life of the console. If it's the latter, they could potentially have a pretty big sum of money depending on the sales figures and the arrangements with Sony, MS, and Nintendo.
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Also, more lucrative as the can advertise that their hardware and designs are the number 1 equipment used by console gaming companies, and that's worth something.
 
EPOQ said:
Sounds like AMD needs to invest in endpoint DLP measures to prevent employees from removing files from their work computers.
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EPOQ said:
Truth. And there are companies out there that sell endpoint data loss prevention software that disable the possibility of doing things like this.
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I support Enterprise HDLP and NDLP, and you would be shocked at the amount of big companies I see, that configure their polices to strictly monitor and not do any sort of blocking. It is incredibly mind boggling. Sure they have the evidence of theft, but what the hell, you could have PREVENTED it from happening in the first place! Just crazy....
 
if the former asshats jacked company property before they went to nv and did so under the guidance and direction of nv management this will get really messy for them. nvidia is done all newer games after all the next gen consoles are out will be optimized for amd hardware.
 
i really hope nv is ready for the assrape by amd. 1 person stealing from amd before they left is defensible... 4 is outright theft compelled and orchestrated by nv
 
ballistic90 said:
Also, more lucrative as the can advertise that their hardware and designs are the number 1 equipment used by console gaming companies, and that's worth something.
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As far as compatibility and optimization goes, that could potentially mean AMD develops a lead over nVidia in the PC space as well. At this point it seems pretty certain AMD has booked all 3 consoles, and provided it's roughly the same uArch (GCN?), AMD could establish a pretty strong foothold as the go-to graphics company for all things gaming. Their driver situation would also drastically improve as developers would be targeting their hardware by default rather than AMD getting around to providing delayed and "meh" updates to root out problems in specific games. The benefits would diminish over the life of the console as AMD moves on to other hardware specs and microarchitectures.

The one console that doesn't look like it's going to go AMD appears to be the SteamBox. Gabe has already been pretty buddy-buddy with nVidia there and that looks to continue with talks of "post-Kepler". I think it's a case of nVidia realizing that they can't piss off the big console makers and still make a killing, because in the end it's inevitably going to bite you in the ass. I have a feeling that nVidia is going to be bending over backwards to get Gabe's approval going forward after learning the hard way that you can't treat the console makers like trash and expect them to come crawling back. This way they at least get a single potentially major next-gen console
 
One of these thieving employees was with Nvidia before going AMD.

With that and some other writings on the wall Nvidia need Apple's defense team to leave unscathed.
 
pelo said:
As far as compatibility and optimization goes, that could potentially mean AMD develops a lead over nVidia in the PC space as well. At this point it seems pretty certain AMD has booked all 3 consoles, and provided it's roughly the same uArch (GCN?), AMD could establish a pretty strong foothold as the go-to graphics company for all things gaming. Their driver situation would also drastically improve as developers would be targeting their hardware by default rather than AMD getting around to providing delayed and "meh" updates to root out problems in specific games. The benefits would diminish over the life of the console as AMD moves on to other hardware specs and microarchitectures.

The one console that doesn't look like it's going to go AMD appears to be the SteamBox. Gabe has already been pretty buddy-buddy with nVidia there and that looks to continue with talks of "post-Kepler". I think it's a case of nVidia realizing that they can't piss off the big console makers and still make a killing, because in the end it's inevitably going to bite you in the ass. I have a feeling that nVidia is going to be bending over backwards to get Gabe's approval going forward after learning the hard way that you can't treat the console makers like trash and expect them to come crawling back. This way they at least get a single potentially major next-gen console
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nVidia does also have a fairly good reputation in the tablet processor market. A reputation that many might feel to be exagerated.
 
ballistic90 said:
nVidia does also have a fairly good reputation in the tablet processor market. A reputation that many might feel to be exagerated.
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They do, but it isn't actually centered around gaming or even GPU performance. Their Tegra products work well and offer great performance for the cost but actually lag behind most others in the GPU. Tegra 4 looks to change that, but it still isn't a unified architecture. Maybe Tegra 5? :mad:
 
pelo said:
They do, but it isn't actually centered around gaming or even GPU performance. Their Tegra products work well and offer great performance for the cost but actually lag behind most others in the GPU. Tegra 4 looks to change that, but it still isn't a unified architecture. Maybe Tegra 5? :mad:
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I think what made Tegra 3 so widely used was name recognition and how they convinced developers to make games to that processor's specs. My phone has a faster processor than my Nexus 7, but no games really take advantage of it.
 
100k trade secret documents? 100k? They could have copied their outlook file and took it with them and that alone could generate a mass number of "documents," but to say there are 100k trade secrets is exaggeration. I would make them count them and every time a document is not a verifiable trade secret that would be the a proportionate percentage AMD would have to pay for the defenses' lawyer fees. 100k... :rolleyes:
 
This type of shit hurts everyone. Nvidia was almost certainly complicit, and probably suggested the espionage.

That company is full of liars and cheats.
 
And many people wonder why I can't stand nVidia. Whether it is crap like this or their TWIMTBP campaign, it just reeks of dishonesty. 4 employees doing this likely means that nVidia was very actively involved in this theft of information. It doesn't matter what the quality of the information is as you don't jack proprietary company property. I can't believe those who actually want to defend nVidia because this isn't like jacking office supplies and taking them home.
 
Then again, an upper level manager watches certain employee's take documents, once the ex-employee's take employment for a competitor you file a lawsuit and really drop "the hammer".

Gotta have at least one conspiracy theory right?
Gary
 
darkstarcow said:
Since this implies the workers took the information to give to Nvidia, I wonder how bad Nvidia is going to get raped in court.
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Probably nothing, unless someone can show that :
1) Nvidia had a part of the theft (AMD is not accusing Nvidia of this)
2) Nvidia received the documents and did not reject those (again, I don't see this accusation)

I do wonder what the 4 employees will face. If copied for their own use, they may be ordered to destroy the documents, and may face civil penalties. But the most useful thing, and I think why AMD is doing this so publicly, is to raise a stink and dirty up as many people (who deserve it if the accusation is true) and a competitor as possible. ;)
 
from pcper http://www.pcper.com/news/General-T...tole-100000-Confidential-Documents-Claims-AMD

After looking at the former employees computers AMD found that "Desai and Kociuk conspired with each other to misappropriate AMD's confidential, proprietary, and/or trade secret information; and/or to intentionally access AMD's protected computers, without authorization and/or in a way that exceeded their authorized access." And since Feldstein and Hagan were responsible for the recruitment of those former AMD employees, they were breaking the "no-solicitation of employees" agreement made before departure.

nvidia is toast this should be worth 1/2 to 1/4 their market value
 
maxius said:
1/2 to 1/4 of nv's market value in damages to amd curse not having and edit button
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Unless Nvidia directly pushed them to do this and used the information to their own advantage (and I seriously doubt it even then), you're incorrect.

Nvidia is trading at around $12 per share currently and has a market cap of approx. $7.5 Billion. The most likely and easiest outcome for AMD is to take their former employees to the cleaner, but even if they added Nvidia to the suite later on I doubt they'd get anywhere close to $1 Billion out of it, much less $3.75 Billion.

Those kind of damages are pretty much unheard of outside of an anti-trust investigation.
 
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