Advanced Micro Devices is taking four former employees to court -- one vice president and three managers from the firm's Boxborough, Mass., plant -- who left the company to go and work for rival Nvidia last year.
The chipmaker is accusing them of coping more than 100,000 confidential documents and trade secrets to take with them.
The suit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, claims former vice president Robert Feldstein, along with managers Manoo Desai, Nicolas Kociuk and Richard Hagen, took the files before they left the company. AMD said it wants to recover the files, which the company claims cover everything from upcoming AMD technology to contracts with enterprise customers.
The court has already issued a temporary restraining order against the four former employees, ordering the preservation of any copies of AMD materials they may have and any computers or devices they may own. They also must not divulge or use any confidential information from AMD.
Feldstein left AMD in July, according to reports, after he helped broker major contracts to see AMD technology launch in the next-generation range of game consoles, including the
Xbox,
PlayStation, and the
Wii U, before he left for Nvidia.
AMD said it had "uncovered evidence" that the four had "transferred to external storage devices trade secret files and information in the days prior to their leaving AMD to work for Nvidia."
"The volume of materials that these three defendants collectively transferred to storage devices, each of which is unaccounted for, as they left to work for AMD's competitor exceeds 100,000 electronic files." AMD also said in the filing that the files "include obviously confidential, proprietary, and/or trade secret materials relating to developing technology and/or highly confidential business strategy."
Specifically, the filing notes that "three highly confidential files -- two licensing agreements with significant customers, and a document outlining proposed strategies to AMD's strategic licensing -- were transferred." If used by Nvidia, the chipmaker said, this would "provide an unfair advantage if improperly used or disclosed."
"Perforce," the name of an AMD internal database containing AMD's technology and development of the company's process and product, were also added to external drives, the company said. The database contains more than 200 files, which have 'confidential' markings on them.
The chipmaker also alleges that one of the managers "ran several Internet searches about how to copy and/or delete large numbers of documents," which was then used to transfer the vast majority of the allegedly stolen files.
AMD claims the four were in breach of their contracts, trade secret laws and unfair competition laws, and violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
An AMD spokesperson told ZDNet in a statement that the company "will always take action to aggressively protect its confidential, proprietary and trade secret information." The spokesperson added:
We believe the facts are clearly outlined in our pleadings and are supported by forensic evidence. The pleadings are publicly available. Current and former AMD employees are contractually required to honor the ongoing confidentiality and non-solicitation obligations each agreed to while employed with us. As this case is now in litigation, we have no further comment at this time.
The lawsuit is here as follows:
The temporary restraining order can be read here:
This story posted originally as "AMD alleges former managers copied 100,000 confidential files before joining Nvidia" on ZDNet.
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