Mercury News: Avant! trade secrets trial starts today. Unlike most Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, however, Avant!’s co-founders used trade secrets stolen from their former employer to establish their company, according to prosecutors and Cadence officials. And in what prosecutors describe as the most brazen example of intellectual property theft to ever hit the tech industry, Avant! executives allegedly continued to exploit the stolen secrets until 1998.
If Avant! did this, it should suffer the ultimate penalty. It should be closed down.
I don’t believe in the death penalty for people. It’s barbaric.
But a corporate death penalty strikes me as reasonable in certain cases. This may be one of them.