[jb613]

What concerns me is that we are going to see more and more of this in the coming years - corporations concerned over ex-employees taking their knowledge with them and taking legal recourse. In this case, they complain about access of 14k proprietary files - which is pretty damning, but I could see similar damning evidence over accessing a couple of critically important design docs relatively near the end of employment. How do you distinguish between files being accessed merely for the purpose out your work vs theft? How can you ascertain what was in their minds and hearts for accessing for those files - and worse, how little would it take to sway a judge or jury that accessing of such files were deliberate (ie part of the bigger picture)? Courts have been wrong before. Previous generations this didn't come up because they stayed in 1 or 2 jobs their entire lives, at least in this aspect, today's environment is completely different.