Paragraph 24 is interesting. Apple’s breach of contract claim is based on Williams’ alleged creation of a competing business in violation of his Intellectual Property Agreement with Apple. Apple appears to concede that Nuvia is targeted to servers and Apple doesn’t make servers. So they have a hook in there that they’ve considered developing or customizing servers. (As a factual matter, I’m not sure anybody would consider customizing servers for internal use to be in competition with selling chips for commercial servers, but that seems to be Apple’s story.)
It’s not clear what Apple’s beef is. Nuvia’s founder clearly did some organizational work while he was at Apple. Maybe that’s enough to technically breach the agreement. (Or maybe not. Without purporting to know anything about California employment law,[1] Nuvia’s motion to dismiss seems pretty robust in its reliance on California law and public policy against non-competes and restraints on employment, as well as preemption of the contract action by trade secrets law.) But what I’m curious about is what Apple thinks the damages are from Nuvia starting a business in a sector (servers) Apple hasn’t competed in for more than a decade?
It’s also curious Apple didn’t bring a trade secrets claim. The architecture of Cyclone, etc., is famously under wraps compared to AMD and Intel’s designs. Apple has gotten amazing performance out of these chips, but nobody is entirely sure how they’re doing it.
[1] Obligatory disclaimer: Not barred in California, not an employment lawyer, etc. For entertainment purposes only.
There is a pretty clear conflict of interest here. The guy was building his company and recruiting Apple employees to it while he was getting paid by Apple. I'm not entirely certain what California's non-compete laws say, I thought they only applied after you left an employer (or in situations where you leave to join another company), not while you are still getting paid, have access to confidential information; recruiting internally; and are using Apple's corporate resources to further your own personal business.
They are pretty robust - I've never heard of anyone successfully being sued for recruiting to go work for a new company, regardless of whether you were still employed. It might be grounds for dismissal - but doesn't appear to break any laws.
I would be super interested if anybody has any counterexample - even a single one would be interesting.
I suspect any legal remedy here is going to be based on proving this guy was working on his business while employed at Apple. While the no-compete has no bite, breach of contract might. And if he's taken trade secrets or confidential information and gets caught, he's toast.
This isn't exactly the same as the Levandowski case, but it sure rhymes.
Levandowski was a different ballgame entirely; him leaving to "found" Otto only for it to be quickly purchased by Uber for an obscene amount of money is something he organized ahead of time with Kalanick. There was also ample forensic evidence that he took large amounts of proprietary data from Waymo.
In the absence of blatant coordination with Kalanick, I think Levandowski would have walked.
When the Levandowski deal broke, there was similarly slim details. It'll be curious to see when the legal case unfolds how Apple is going to build their case. I'd assume they have some kind of legal basis for pursuing this.
Anything done on the employee's own time, using their own equipment, and not relying on IP owned by the company is owned by the employee, and non-competes do not apply. There's a standard form outlining this attached to every CA employment agreement.
Has this actually held up? My understanding is that what specific and specialized areas of work on off-time is considered company IP have to be enumerated, and must depend upon availability of unusual proprietary information.
I haven't found any cases in my (admittedly brief) search that actually rule on this, but there's a pretty clear pattern in CA jurisprudence that suggests that a broad application of "related work" is unlikely to be looked upon positively. To me, it's pretty clear that use of trade secrets would be about the only thing that courts are _likely_ to agree upon as out of bounds for personal work.
I'm not sure I'd read too much into the "for servers" part.
Everyone expects Apple to switch to ARM chips sooner or later for their laptops and desktops. Their A CPUs would probably already be fast enough for entry level Macbooks, but they still need some higher wattage versions for big Macbooks and desktops. I'm also not sure how good Apples chips are with regard to virtualisation features.
These are all things that would be useful for servers, but Apple needs them for their high end desktops as well. (And Apple won't announce in a court filing that they are working on ARM CPUs for the Mac)
Apple’s beef is talent loss, and the lawyers are doing their job by throwing everything they can at him. Remember what they did last time their competitors were hiring their people away.
> It’s also curious Apple didn’t bring a trade secrets claim. The architecture of Cyclone, etc., is famously under wraps compared to AMD and Intel’s designs. Apple has gotten amazing performance out of these chips, but nobody is entirely sure how they’re doing it.
I’m genuinely curious what you think apples strategy is here. If their performance is so much better than intel, wouldn’t it reason that they are worried he could slip Intel proprietary knowledge under the guise of “servers” that they then reuse for other things... but if that’s true then why not, ask you ask, bring a trade secrets claim? I’m curious about how you see the legal strategy - is a trade secret claim harder to prove?
Per the server claim, I wonder if the rack mounted Mac Pro would count?
From Apple's website:
"For customers who want to rack mount their Mac Pro in edit bays or machine rooms, an optimized version for rack deployment will be available this fall." [0]
> Apple appears to concede that Nuvia is targeted to servers and Apple doesn’t make servers. So they have a hook in there that they’ve considered developing or customizing servers.
Is there a legal definition of ‘server’? Genuinely curious. I ask because today Apple announced the Mac Pro rack-mount edition, which seems oriented to datacenter deployments.
>(As a factual matter, I’m not sure anybody would consider customizing servers for internal use to be in competition with selling chips for commercial servers, but that seems to be Apple’s story.)
>it’s not clear what Apple’s beef is.
Consider this scenario, Apple has a Server / Mac Pro / High Power ARM Chip Design for their own use. Their employees quit and brought this design to a new company and sell it on open market.
>Apple appears to concede that Nuvia is targeted to servers and Apple doesn’t make servers
While I don't disagree with anything you are saying, I will note that Apple is kinda back in the server game, given that Mac OS server is still a thing, and now (or soon) there is a rack mounted Mac offering again...
I think there is a misunderstanding of what 'iOS', 'OS X' and 'Linux' are.... you're saying they wanted to port their operating system to another operating system....?
Judging by how keen they are to never adopt anything ever written by anyone else, I think it is precisely the opposite. They have a "not invented here" syndrome that causes them to keep hold of everything they create to be in full control of it. It makes sense commercially. Examples:
a. Swift language - they could have just used C# but decided to create Swift to force yet another generation of developers to learn the language only used by Apple (same as Objective C)
b. Their chips on their phones / iPads
c. The soldered-on SSDs on their laptops instead of user-replaceable items
d. APFS - their "new" filesystem is still lightyears behind NTFS in terms of features - why didn't they adopt NTFS instead???
Heck, even sharing files from your Mac to your Apple TV needs Apple's blessing before it'll AirPlay to it (via iTunes, not sure on whatever they're using now).
They will never ever ever ever adopt the Linux kernel.
Paragraph 24 is interesting. Apple’s breach of contract claim is based on Williams’ alleged creation of a competing business in violation of his Intellectual Property Agreement with Apple. Apple appears to concede that Nuvia is targeted to servers and Apple doesn’t make servers. So they have a hook in there that they’ve considered developing or customizing servers. (As a factual matter, I’m not sure anybody would consider customizing servers for internal use to be in competition with selling chips for commercial servers, but that seems to be Apple’s story.)
It’s not clear what Apple’s beef is. Nuvia’s founder clearly did some organizational work while he was at Apple. Maybe that’s enough to technically breach the agreement. (Or maybe not. Without purporting to know anything about California employment law,[1] Nuvia’s motion to dismiss seems pretty robust in its reliance on California law and public policy against non-competes and restraints on employment, as well as preemption of the contract action by trade secrets law.) But what I’m curious about is what Apple thinks the damages are from Nuvia starting a business in a sector (servers) Apple hasn’t competed in for more than a decade?
It’s also curious Apple didn’t bring a trade secrets claim. The architecture of Cyclone, etc., is famously under wraps compared to AMD and Intel’s designs. Apple has gotten amazing performance out of these chips, but nobody is entirely sure how they’re doing it.
[1] Obligatory disclaimer: Not barred in California, not an employment lawyer, etc. For entertainment purposes only.