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Comment by benihana | Hacker News Reader

What a shit headline. This isn't about stealing talent, it's about stealing property. The whole issue is here:

"hiring Jawbone employees who improperly downloaded sensitive materials shortly before leaving."

"During her exit interviews, Ms. Rosario initially denied taking confidential information, but she later acknowledged downloading its “Market Trends & Opportunities” presentation, the complaint said."

Go after the individual employees for stealing from you, not fitbit for hiring them.

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Unless FitBit asked them to acquire the information. Then it's appropriate to go after both.

reading between the lines, it seems like they may have cause to believe fitbit induced the employees to grab that information before leaving. If that's the case then the case against fitbit makes more sense

> What a shit headline.

We changed the URL last night (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9616643) but forgot to change the headline as well. (It was "Jawbone sues Fitbit for stealing its talent and trade secrets".)

First off what's a download? If I do a "git pull" on my last day of the job, simply in the course of my duties, could I be accused of stealing from the company?

If Jawbone is a typical large company, they do DPI on all their employees Internet traffic and have DLP software monitoring what files are moved to what directories/removable media on employees equipment.

I think it's safe to assume that if they're pursuing this kind of lawsuit, they have realistic evidence.

If you pull and then move those files to your own media and to top it off use that code in your new job, there's a problem.

I've known people who've done it and I've had to clean up after them when it came to light where the code for certain modules came from. It sucks.

If you do a "git pull" on a repo that you don't normally work in, or after you've been told not to work on anymore, that might send up some signal flares. If it's as part of your normal work, I'm sure it's fine.

what does "improperly downloaded" mean here?

They didn't have permission to download? or weren't supposed to be downloaded by employees who are leaving?

Copying internal private documents for the explicit purpose of sharing them with your new employer, who happens to be a competitor.

Don't they need to prove they were shared?

From the second paragraph of the article:

> Jawbone sued Fitbit in California State Court here on Wednesday, accusing its rival of “systematically plundering” confidential information by hiring Jawbone employees who improperly downloaded sensitive materials shortly before leaving.

Last paragraph:

> According to the court filing, Jawbone is seeking both financial damages and relief from the court to prevent the former employees from using the information Jawbone says they took from the company.

I'm no lawyer, but they could be in trouble even if they didn't get around to sharing documentation, but were planning on doing so after quitting and being courted by a rival.

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