Steve Jobs threatened patent suit to enforce no-hire policy: filing

I love how this no-poaching debacle really shines a light on the hypocrisy of some much beloved tech mega-corps.<p>Google and Apple execs may shower employees with perks, but at the end of the day, top execs still treat most of their labor like a statistic to be optimized and exploited for maximum value rather than human beings. The only difference is some of the tech companies have realized that happy employees are good employees.<p>Which I guess is progress. But what i'd really like to see more common decency and respect of the rank and file employee by senior management.<p>Colluding to not hire employees of your friends company is extremely disrespectful because it means lower employee wages over-all, and it's using the dominant position of an employer to limit the options/free-will of your employee to protect their own profits.

They gave us 10% raises in the name of retention. This also happened right around the time they killed the no-poaching policies. That sounds like the kind of insurance they needed now that the no-poaching policies were gone.<p>Come on, lawyers, someone prove that this cost us all 10% of our salaries for the duration of the agreements. Then have them do the numbers and cough up that much money they didn't pay us because we magically weren't being wooed by these other companies. I could stand to make quite a bit from this, and a bunch of my friends could, too.

Finally, here's his true color. "Don't do this or I will sue you" is the most unimaginative, terrible, desperate statement one could make to enforce their <i>unfair</i> superiority over others, especially given the fact that this person was known to be a lot more creative and intelligent otherwise.

It's unfortunate that these execs won't get prison time for this, and that Jobs wont be tried and sentenced posthumously.<p>Yet downloading unprotected email addresses is worth up to 10 years, and downloading academic journals is worth up to 35.<p>Really, which of these things is more damaging?

&#62; "Schmidt responded that he preferred it be shared 'verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?'" he said, according to the court filing. The HR director agreed.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGo5bxWy21g&#38;t=78s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGo5bxWy21g&#38;t=78s</a>

<i>"In 2010, Google, Apple, Adobe Systems Inc, Intel, Intuit Inc and Walt Disney Co's Pixar unit agreed to a settlement of a U.S. Justice Department probe that bars them from agreeing to refrain from poaching each other's employees."</i><p>How do you check that the companies are not still colluding? Is there some background level of 'poaching' the DoJ expects? Confusing.

I have always wondered why this was not taken by the DOJ actively without a filing required from tech workers. This incident was widely reported in the media and the law system should have just pre-empted this situation. In the Swartz case, the prosecution pursued even after JSTOR dropped the charges. Why can't the same be done in this case?

I think these practices show a total lack of respect from these companies (in this case Apple) to their own employees, it's shameful.

Here's a link to the actual filing:<p><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/121737673/Colligan-Affidavit" rel="nofollow">http://www.scribd.com/doc/121737673/Colligan-Affidavit</a><p>Quite illuminating.

What is no-hire policy? Can someone explain it please?

Is it telling that the only company in this mess that had any principles (Palm) is the only one that couldn't make it in the long run? Maybe I am just reading too much into that.

If other economic sectors were as free from regulation as the computer industry, business would be mostly booming in those sectors as well. One of the things those businesses would want is more technical employees.<p>In that predominantly free market, anti-poaching agreements wouldn't be effective, because it isn't possible for any single enterprise to forge agreements of this kind with more than a handfull of its peers at a time.<p>Don't believe me? Banking and medicine are two of the most heavily regulated industries in the US. And it's why, given the choice of working for Kaiser Permanente, Bank of America, Apple, or Google, any one of us would choose Apple or Google over the other two.

After the Palm CEO refused to collude: "This is not satisfactory to Apple...My advice is to take a look at our patent portfolio before you make a final decision here. Steve"<p>Wow.

Wow, that is beyond evil.

<i>"[Eric] Schmidt responded that he preferred it be shared 'verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?'"<p>"Mr. Jobs also suggested that if Palm did not agree to such an arrangement, Palm could face lawsuits alleging infringement of Apple's many patents,"</i><p>So much for being a country of laws. Was any of these execs ever prosecuted or suffered a penny in fines for this? Sure conspiracy to do something illegal is illegal

At least Steve Jobs knew what the patent system was actually for.

I somehow understand that Jobs would be angry when Palm started hiring all those people from the iPod team, especially at a time when Apple was stealthily working on the iPhone.<p>As much as I despise patent litigation, I can understand Jobs' point of view: when so many people change from one company to another, a lot of knowledge will go with them. One could interpret Jobs' threat of just a means to protect Apple's intellectual property. To ensure that Palm doesn't use stuff that Rubinstein et al developed at Apple.