Apple upholds rights by US court: accusing former employees and Rivos of stealing chip secrets

CTOnews.com, August 12 (Xinhua)-- the California District Court recently ruled that Apple can continue to sue Rivos, according to Bloomberg.

Apple believes that there is ample evidence that former employees stole trade secrets for Rivos, which Rivos used to design and customize its system-on-chip (SoC) processors.

Judge Edward Davila of the San Jose District Court ruled that Apple could continue to defend its rights by suing three former employees and Rivos.

Judge Davila also rejected Apple's claim against seven other former employees, although Apple could resubmit the claim after revising the claim.

CTOnews.com previously reported that Apple sued Rivos last year, alleging that the company hired former Apple employees and stole Apple proprietary (patent) information during the hiring process.

Apple says the start-up wants to design chips that can compete with it, but it believes Rivos is using Apple's patent information to design chips.

In the lawsuit, Apple also accused former employees poached by Rivos of stealing "thousands of megabytes of sensitive SoC specifications and design documents".

Some people use multiple USB storage drives to transfer materials to personal devices, use Apple proprietary specifications stored in collaboration applications, and use AirDrop to transfer files to personal devices.

Some people have saved a large number of presentations on existing and unreleased Apple SoC (marked as proprietary and confidential) to their personal cloud drives. One person even completely backed up the Time Machine from his entire Apple device to his personal external drive.

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Apple accuses former engineers of stealing chip secrets through AirDrop and Time Machine.