Personally I don't think what he did was wrong.
I think the moral of the story is don't do non-work related things on your work computer. It shifts the liability from the individual to the company.
I think the moral of the story is don't do non-work related things on your work computer. It shifts the liability from the individual to the company.
To quote Tom Scott, a youtuber, "I'm not telling you how it should be, I'm just telling you how it is."
In my old company we were told to perform competitor analysis only through publicly available information - blogs, marketing announcements, videos, ads, etc. No creating a free account to poke around. I often wondered what happened in the past to have this rule.
At the present time the legal system is not involved beyond anything other than the terms of employment in the employee's contract.
Just because a company may have the right to fire a person at will does not prove that the employee did anything wrong. (morally or legally)