Still, it was generous of HP not to sue him afterwards. It sounds like he was using company resources to build it, they would have had a strong case. Even if they were not interested in commercializing at the time.
I think in today's world, he would definitely be sued.
Today, it would be illegal for HP to sue him for it after having declined to take up the product when the employee first offered it to the company, because CA labor law explicitly addresses this situation.
This is in fact one of the ways that an employee can retain rights to an IP or product that is otherwise within the scope of the company's active businesses.
Companies can can do claim that ideas from employees are a company resource, even when worker is paid hourly and off the clock and the idea was on the employees own time.
Not really a fair comparison. While Woz was at HP, he wasn't the executive/leader of their personal computing division.
I don't see how anyone can fault Apple here when the person doing this was leading their entire chip division.
Scenario: I own car washes and hire someone to run and manage one of my locations. I pay them well and put them at the helm of the entire location. This person is able to completely learn the ins and outs of my business and in the meantime is slowly working on poaching other members of my staff and getting things lined up to open a competitive car wash.
I'm on the side of allowing all employees, including executives and rank and file employees, to quit and work for a competitor without being sued. This is how a competitive labor market is supposed to work.
> quit and work for a competitor without being sued
"Quit" is the operative work here. The employee in question was building the competitor using Apple resources. He didn't quit and work for a competitor. He worked for a competitor and then quit.
> While Woz was at HP, he wasn't the executive/leader of their personal computing division
Why does position even matter? Ultimately in this industry it's talent and skill that prevail. Woz was at least as capable, if not more, than anyone else working in a technical capacity at HP at the time. He arguably had better business sense than anyone at the company too because they had the opportunity to start the personal computer revolution but passed on it.
Not sure why the position is relevant, nor do I think Jobs's precedent was relevant.
"a duty of loyalty to the company" - wholly made up. The company has no loyalty to you.
"breached an intellectual property agreement" - this is the meat of the case. The rest is theater, including the subject.
You have skill and talent and you are paid to do a series of tasks. You can capitalize those talents in many ways to make money, working for a company is an option.
If you don't treat your employees well enough, they might leave and might even compete with you. We have laws to enforce this relationship at almost every possible turn. It's REALLY hard to get away with sabotage or inside information without quitting. Having your own LLC is great for a number of personal finance reasons.
This has nothing to do with loyalty. I agree that there is nothing wrong with this person going off to do their own thing. But getting that started on company time, including poaching other Apple employees, is totally out of line.
I don't think you know the whole story. He gave HP the option to own all his work on the Apple I, and he was aware the entire time of the conflict of interest with his employer, and vocal about it.
The rule of law has a lot of ambiguities and intent and context certainly matter.
If someone repeatedly says “you can have this” and you say “no” and then say “no wait I want it now that it is valuable” you probably don’t have an open and shut case regardless of what a contract says.
I’m not super familiar with Woz’s story so if that’s not what happened, my point was more about the ambiguities of the law and flexibility of its application.
He was both aware and vocal about it and tried to do something about it, but HP was not interested, which gave him freedom to pursue it independently with Jobs.
https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/blog/atlantech/2013/01/w...