Former Qualcomm employee who left to join Nokia gets 3 years probation

A former Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) Inc. employee who downloaded nearly 450,000 files of secret source code to his home computer before quitting to take a job with rival Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Corp. was sentenced to three years’ probation Wednesday for stealing trade secrets.

Michael Laude, 47, had code that represented “virtually all of Qualcomm’s product line,” according to the U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego.

A thorough investigation produced no evidence that he shared the code with his new employers at Nokia, a major Qualcomm rival, said Mitch Dembin, an assistant U.S. attorney, though Laude “had enough information to bring Qualcomm to its knees.”

A Nokia spokesman, William Plummer, said Nokia was unaware of the theft and never benefited from stolen information. Nokia cooperated with the federal investigation.

Qualcomm, which licenses technology for mobile phones and manufactures semiconductor chips that run them, is embroiled in legal and trade disputes with Nokia and other companies that contend Qualcomm extracts excessive royalty payments for its devices.

Source: Sign On San Diego

Ouch! Corporate espionage … they can’t make a compelling video game from such a plot. Would be fun to see a game developer try though! But in all seriousness he got what he deserved. It would be like a Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) employee defecting to Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and knowing all the trade secrets.