How the World Works?

Simon K says:

Its unfortunately become fairly common for silicon valley companies to use lawsuits against individuals and criminal proceedings for copyright infringement and theft of trade secrets as tools of intimidation to force settlement or abandonment of larger (to them) civil proceedings between firms. Because these are criminal offenses and/or concern individuals rather than firms, they give people are massive incentive to abandon the civil corporate suit.

A fairly typical case goes like this: Company M sues Company S, which is a larger more established player for patent infringement. Company S has internal records that show it has some claim to have invented the technology before Company M. Company S could try to show prior art in the patent lawsuit, but this is incredibly hard and the courts almost always reject it. Both companies have deep enough pockets that this could drag on more or less indefinitely. Instead, Company S finds a senior former employee, Dr G, who moved to Company M prior to the patent being filed and had something to do with the technology and sues him for breach of contract. If the evidence is strong enough, they’ll also call the state prosecutor and have Dr G prosecuted for theft of trade secrets, which is a criminal offense. Dr G will of course be scared shitless, probably never having had anything worse that a driving infraction on his record before, and try to get Company M to settle. In the case I have in mind, they did. In reality, what Dr G did is probably perfectly normal and protected by standard law (you can’t claim ownership of the contents of someone’s unaided memory, however hard you might try), but he just doesn’t want the inordinate personal expense and possible criminal record that could result. Since the purposes of these prosecutions is basically intimidation, they’ll throw whatever shit they may have on hand at the same time to see what sticks – given the nature of silicon valley, implying immigration violations isn’t uncommon.

Sadly, the only real difference I see in this case is that they ended up involving the Canadian authorities who called bullshit before the prosecution reached a US court. Had the prosecution reached a US court, I’d expect they would similarly have called bullshit eventually. The thing I don’t understand here, and maybe one of our local lawyers could help, is why the prosecutors office pursues these things? I’m thinking that they don’t see it as their job to decide the merits of the case, but leave that to the courts. But what level of evidence is actually required to get them to act?Report