On Friday 30 May 2003 08:20 am, Nick Zentena wrote:
On May 30, 2003 12:36 pm, James Mohr wrote:
On Friday 30 May 2003 18:40, Curtis Rey wrote:
On Friday 30 May 2003 03:08 am, James Mohr wrote:
<my stuff snipped>
If this is indeed the case then there is the question of "diligence". It states that a company must take precautions to make its trade secrets secure and failure to show diligence is cause for forfeiture of IP and patent rights.
So, if SCO fired/laid off a substantial enough of its developer work force and did not take the steps that the courts feel it should have then SCO was negligent in securing access and use of their property. This is a matter of fact and can be reviewed on a number of legel sites... I have already seens the statutes that state this. Likewise a few on the list have stated this as well. Now the issue is proving this and I'm sure that if, as you elude to, this came from some disgruntled former employee then his/her testimony would most likely be a death toll to SCOs claim and case.
Cheers, Curtis.
Which could mean essentially that the patents, copyright, whatever governing the IP was no longer valid when SCO sold it to Caldera.
Well, I am not a "disgruntled former employee" because I left several years before the transfer. However, I can tell you that security was lax enough that it would never have passed a security audit. I can remember rummaging through the kernel code, TCP/IP, SMP, and many other places. At least that demonstrates that a would-be corporate spy would have had opportunity to access the trade secrets.
Hmmm. Before I spill the beans any more, maybe I just ought to talk with the IBM legal department.
Who would be crazy enough to admit they stole SCO IP? You think they might press criminal charges? They might just claim the person who received the goods should have known it was stolen. Just because you managed to steal something doesn't mean they didn't take reasonable care.
No need to go to disgruntled SCO employees. In the past plenty of schools held full AT&T Unix source code. The stuff was used to create BSD right? It was used in classes.
Nick
In the U.S. industrial espionage is not formally on the books as a crime. The crimes related to this would be such things as gaining access to property or premises illegally (e.g. unlawful entry. theft of documents, violation of an NDA/contract, etc..). But once the information is out it's out and frankly theirs little recourse after that. Companies do it to each other all the time. If you can find a statute related to industrial espionage I would like to read it. Seriously, when I found out that this was the case I was a bit amazed. But the fact of the matter is there is no law related to industrial espionage. Tie this with the statutes about the responsiblities related to secure trade secrets and it's a very narrow line to defend. There are cases where stolen trade secrets were protected in the courts. But in these cases it was more a case of several violations as previously said and a collusional behavior of a company, e.g. there was evidence that company X hired and conspired to gain access to information or design with a 3rd party against company Y in such a manner the the very nature of the action was illegal from the it's inception and that extordinary measures had to be taken to circumvent protect measures in order to access it, and in doing so violated several State and Federal statutes. If you would like I can give you a few links that explain this in detail, especially the area of taking the proper protective measures to perform due dilegence to protect ones properties and right. This is extremely true in relaionship to intenal use and employee access. It's on the books, seriously! Cheers, Curtis.