AMD has initiated legal action against four former employees which the chipmaker claims had between them stolen over 100,000 confidential documents and trade secrets before joining with rival Nvida.
These documents are said to contain information on AMD ranging from details on technology in development to confidential business strategy.
The lawsuit documents also mention that “three highly confidential files — two licensing agreements with significant customers, and a document outlining proposed strategies to AMD’s strategic licensing — were transferred.”
IGN claims that their well-placed sources have previously revealed that the PlayStation 4 will use custom silicon based on AMD’s A8-series APU and HD 7670 GPU; the Xbox 720 will combine an IBM PowerPC CPU and a custom version of AMD’s 6670 GPU. It’s not a far stretch of the imagination to see how this might be linked to the aforementioned “licensing agreements with significant customers”.
The accused include former AMD vice-president Robert Feldstein, and managers Manoo Desai, Nicolas Kociuk and Richard Hagen.
According to ZDNet “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 issued a statement to ZDNet, saying:
“[AMD] will always take action to aggressively protect its confidential, proprietary and trade secret information. 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.”
Sources: ZDNet; IGN 1, 2
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