![]() ![]() After a subsequent bench trial, the court held the competitor to which the employee had been feeding information jointly and severally liable. AFS won on summary judgment when the district court found the ex-employee and his company liable for misappropriation. ![]() The engineer resigned from AFS, formed his own business, and successfully outbid both companies for another project contract.ĪFS, having lost out on the contracts, sued its ex-employee, his company, the other competing company, and the company that took over the facility alleging trade secret misappropriation under Pennsylvania’s Trade Secret Act. He helped that competitor obtain the contract, while simultaneously working on (and undermining) AFS’s bid. An AFS sales engineer who was “intimately involved” in AFS’s project gave the drawings to an AFS competitor. When a company using the facility for its rocket launch took over from the space authority, it solicited new vendors. The company’s retention of these materials became key in the tale of “disloyalty and deception” that followed. Still, AFS retained them and marked them as AFS’s confidential information. AFS’s contract with the Virginia Commonwealth Space Flight Authority deemed these materials “work for hire” and the “exclusive property” of the space authority. The trade secrets at issue were Advanced Fluid Systems' engineering drawings from its design and installation of a hydraulic system for the facility. Huber involved competing hydraulics companies vying for contracts with a NASA rocket launch facility in Virginia. Other courts, including the Fourth and Tenth Circuits, have ruled similarly, signaling a growing consensus among courts to focus on possession rather than ownership when evaluating standing in trade secret cases. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit held that a company that did not own, but lawfully possessed, a trade secret could bring a misappropriation claim. Cao was said to have uploaded 300,000 files and directories, including the Autopilot source code.In Advanced Fluid Systems v. In Cao’s case, Tesla alleged he began uploading thousands of files after Xiaopeng offered him the role of “head of perception” in November 2018. in January 2019, was sued by Tesla, who alleged that he uploaded internal source code for Tesla’s Autopilot to the cloud. Zhang’s case is not the only one where a former employee of a large company is alleged to have stolen autonomous car-related technology and then sought employment at Xiopeng Motors in China. Guangzhi Cao, a former engineer who left Tesla Inc. The sentencing hearing is scheduled for November. ![]() The details of the plea agreement were not disclosed, but Zhang was facing up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. In a series of interviews, Zhang confessed to downloading the data. In its indictment, the Federal Bureau of Investigation alleged that “the majority of his activity consisted of both bulk searches and targeted downloading copious pages of information from various confidential database applications.” The information included “trade secret intellectual property, based on the level of Zhang’s access within Apple’s autonomous vehicle team.” Zhang was subsequently arrested by federal agents in July 2018 at the San Jose International Airport, where he was attempting to fly to China. His intended new employer immediately raised concern among his direct line managers at Apple.Īpple’s security team investigated Zhang’s activities and discovered that he had not only been accessing confidential and proprietary Apple technology but had been downloading it as well, all in the time leading up to his resignation. Ltd., an autonomous vehicle manufacturer backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. However, Zhang made the mistake of telling Apple that he was seeking employment Guangzhou Xiaopeng Motors Technology Co. Xiaolang Zhang was employed by Apple in December 2015 to work on Project Titan, Apple’s self-driving car project, where he was given the job of designing and testing circuit boards to analyze sensor data. Zhang quit Apple in April 2018, saying he wanted to return to China to be with his family.Īs noted at the time, an employee quitting Apple is nothing unusual. engineer has pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets from Apple’s car division in a plea agreement with U.S. ![]()
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