In April this year, Samsung filed a patent infringement lawsuit against the BOE, claiming that the Chinese display maker has been poaching the South Korean tech giant’s employees and stealing the company’s trade secrets for micro OLED displays.
How is poaching employee illegal? If Samsung wants to keep its employees, they can pay them more.
Apple/Google and others tried to do such illegal (in the US) non-competes earlier in this century: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-google-recruitment-emails-lawsuit-2014-1
That being said, China does tend to have …various techniques for copying/stealing technology and passing it off as their own. Is it good or bad? Who knows. Their copy of the tech may end up being superior. Every company worth their salt tends to have R&D departments that take apart the competition’s hardware/software to see how it functions, though. GM did it with cheap Japanese cars to design the Saturn in the 1990s, and that was lauded.
Always a weird/interesting problem. Do we let a company have a monopoly so we have 20 years of Qualcomm cornering the market on wireless modems and no other vendor was legally able to pursue their own flavors easily so they were always inferior, if they existed at all? Do we let company B steal the idea of company A and become wildly more popular, destroying company A’s income because company B just did it better? Does the end result become more cutthroat markets? Or do things shake out organically? Patents seemed a good mechanism to allow a company a temporary edge in a domain, but then they quickly become abused (see: Qualcomm) so that company can ostensibly be a forever monopoly.
Edit: Oh, and Samsung copies iOS (and vice versa) with every phone release, so are they any better?
I don’t think the problem is poaching, it’s poaching and then paying those employees to design identical hardware that uses company secrets.
You can’t hire ex coca cola employees and pay them to make an identical cola recipe either.
I still don’t see what the problem is with competition for employees to design identical hardware. That’s the nature of free market competition, expect in a literal as opposed to polemical sense.
You also need to prove that an employee that went with a higher salary shared information in a illegal manner. And non-compete aren’t actually legal everywhere.
Oh I agree with that, but working within the current capitalist market, companies won’t like workers actually using what they’ve learned at a competing company. I just thought it was pretty important to distinguish between suing a competing company for poaching workers, and suing a company for poaching workers with the express purpose of copying a design.
