NVIDIA Hit With Lawsuit For Stealing Trade Secrets, Engineer Caught Screen Sharing
Jakob Aylesbury / 1 year ago
NVIDIA has been hit with a lawsuit all thanks to a mistake from software developer Mohammad Moniruzzaman whilst screen sharing during a video call.
Engineer Caught Sharing Trade Secrets
As reported by Siliconvalley.com, Mohammad Moniruzzaman is a software developer who began working with NVIDIA in 2021 after leaving his former company, Valeo, a European company in the automotive industry. Both NVIDIA and Valeo had a contract with another automotive company to develop parking-assistance software which is the key focus of this lawsuit. Moniruzzaman was previously working on this software at Valeo however moved over to NVIDIA taking his experience and knowledge with him to produce the software, the problem is, that Moniruzzaman had simply copied the source code from Valeo to use at NVIDIA.
Moniruzzaman was on a video call doing a presentation to nine other people and made the mistake of minimising the presentation window. In doing so it allowed the other participants, who were part of Valeo, to notice source code that belonged to them. The evidence was screenshotted and a lawsuit was made against Moniruzzaman. An audit was conducted which discovered that he had copied “the entirety of Valeo’s parking and driving assistance source code from his Valeo computer to a personal computer,” and then transferred these files to his NVIDIA work computer. Two months ago he was convicted in Germany for unlawful acquisition, use and disclosure of Valeo’s trade secrets.
All of this leads to a full lawsuit against NVIDIA who Valeo claims “provided NVIDIA and its engineers a shortcut in the development of its first parking-assistance software, and saved NVIDIA millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of dollars in development costs,”. NVIDIA has allegedly claimed that the actions of Moniruzzaman were entirely unknown to them and that he claimed the files were only stored on his laptop and not shared with other NVIDIA employees. NVIDIA also added that they had no interest in the stolen code or alleged trade secrets.
This is quite the blunder, just goes to show that with our growing use of video conferencing, we should be very careful with what we have on the screen.
