Maybe, we don't have any idea how bad their legal position is. They might be considering themselves lucky to avoid prison, like Anthony Levandowski. 50 years ago doing what he did was normal; it was how Silicon Valley got built. Since then the laws have changed.
Curious if you could supply any specific examples of that being normal in old SV? Of people taking a massive cache of proprietary work, including original research done by colleagues?
Not precisely what you asked for but relevant to this topic of a game engine: A bunch of former NCSoft developers got sued (and lost) for heading off to their new game studio BlueHole with stolen Lineage 3 code and design material. This resulted in jail time.
Basically the entire collection of papers of the Charles Babbage Institute consists of boxes of stuff people took home with them, including original research done by colleagues.
Also, as someone pointed out, Fairchild. And as they mysteriously failed to point out, Intel spawned from Fairchild the same way.
At best the "traitorous eight" took with them the direction of research and work they wanted, which wasn't supported by Schockley - and Schockley did try to lockdown as much of the IP he could, taking patents out even if they were dubiously assigned to company.
Yes, my claim wasn't that investors approved of their employees leaving to compete with them; my claim was that, since then, the laws had changed in ways that gave them more power to prevent it, for example by vastly expanding the scope of trade-secret law. Levandowski wasn't accused of infringing any patents.
Given the expansive scope of papers donated to historical archives by various engineers from that period, it would be at least atypical if they only took the direction of research and work they wanted, rather than extensive knowhow and documentation of the processes they'd developed while working for Shockley (not "Schockley").
Nowadays the practices that made Silicon Valley possible are illegal in California but legal in China.