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by aurareturn 908 days ago
Is poaching talent illegal? I thought tech employees have successfully sued big tech companies for anti-poaching policies many years ago?

Could they have spoken to Masimo, determined that their asking price for the technology is unreasonable, the patents are not very defensible, Apple could develop it internally for much cheaper, and finally decide to also pay Masimo's employees more to increase development speed?
1 comments
whatever1 908 days ago
Poaching to re-implement patented technology, is.
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dagmx 908 days ago
That would be IP theft and is completely unrelated to the patent system, and that hasn’t been proven in this case fwiw.

While some patents were found to have been infringed, that is different than IP theft even if the same people are involved.

It’s a poor extrapolation or idea anyway. Patents are public, and no sane entity would hire someone to reimplement a patent without a license.

More likely, they thought they were far enough from the patents in their new implementation and either did not know of the specific patents (were the same employees named on those patents?) or had a different reading of the invention described.

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whatever1 908 days ago
To establish IP theft wouldn't one have to establish the existence of physical evidence (aka Hard Discs, emails, or any other data/documents transfers)?

Brain transfers do not suffice to make the case.

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dagmx 908 days ago
No, you can also discover similarity in implementation to a degree that is much more scrutinized than patent infringement.

Hiring employees away to work on the same field of technology isn’t illegal by any means (and is explicitly not allowed to be illegal in California’s non compete rules).

Your comment said they hired them to replicate patented technology being illegal. It is not illegal, unless IP theft is involved.

But there’s been no evidence or even accusations towards that by the parties involved. That’s why the case has been purely in patent law and not corporate theft.

That they were found to have infringed the patents doesn’t have enough information to extrapolate legality of the hiring or work they did. Otherwise every other area of patent dispute like modems and design patents would be full of IP theft rulings too as folks move around.

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