In March, the FBI’s Chicago field office arrested a 52-year-old former employee of Valspar Corp, and charged him with theft of company secrets. The former employee, David Yen Lee of Arlington Heights, Ill., faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Valspar was tipped off to the theft after Lee [...]

Bad news came to McKesson Corp. yesterday in the form of a ruling by U.S. District Judge Patti B. Saris. Judge Saris certified a number of 2005 suits by the New England Carpenters Health Benefits Fund as class action, and allowed them to

What started off as a media dream story (with the words “Rupert Murdoch,” “employs” and “hacker” all in the same headline) ended on a very anticlimactic, and somewhat humorous, note. Readers might remember the DISH Network lawsuit that hoped to receive nearly $1 billion in damages from

Who says random airport searches don’t work? United States customs officials discovered that Hanjuan Jin, 37, a China-born U.S. citizen, was allegedly trying to leak confidential trade secrets from her former U.S. employer to a China-based rival when they searched her luggage at

A whopper of a sentence came in on Monday for the Chinese-born engineer who last May was convicted of conspiring to hand over U.S. military secrets to China. Chi Mak, 67, was given 24 1/2 years for smuggling top secret data, acting as an unregistered foreign agent in the U.S., attempting to violate export [...]

A Florida man has been found guilty of dishing out company trade secrets from his former employer, Alpha Mining Systems, to competitors. Alpha, a global manufacturer of industrial mining tires, won a $19.7 million judgment against Sam Vance, the company’s former sales and marketing manager. The judge ruled that Vance gave competitors more [...]

What happened to the good old days, when employees just raided the supply closet? Fidelity National reported that the personal data of as many as 8.5 million customers was taken by a senior database administrator at the company. The company suggested that this number, up from initial reports from Fidelity of 2.3 million, [...]

Casual Male won a $1.5 million settlement against both a former associate and a competitor.
A jury determined that Robert Yarbrough broke his contract with the company after he violated non-competition obligations and leaked company secrets. He was charged with $1.1 million in damages.
Westport Big & Tall, a competitor of Casual Male, was [...]

Qualcomm Inc. announced today the resignation of General Counsel Lou Lupin. Lupin had been known for his aggressive “take no prisoners” approach. Carol Lam, a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California, was named his interim successor. Analysts are thinking that in pushing Lupin out [...]

A Long Island man pleaded guilty on Wednesday of conspiring to destroy a rival company’s product. Robert A. Schetty, III, 42, a vice president of Technic, Inc., coordinated an attempt to place hydrogen peroxide in a bath of chemicals used by rival company Rohm and Haas, Co. to test their new electroplating solution. [...]

Two former Ferrari engineers accused of stealing trade secrets have been convicted of industrial espionage and sentenced to jail by an Italian court over charges of stealing confidential engineering data from Ferrari and using it to design cars for motor racing rivals Toyota.
Sensitive data stolen from Ferrari included engineering documents, test data, and other undisclosed [...]

Land O’Lakes, Inc. has been ordered to pay a Colorado feed manufacturer $15.2 million after a federal jury found that the company knowingly infringed upon the manufacturer’s trademark.
Cache La Poudre sued Land O’Lakes in 2004, alleging that the company began rebranding its lines of show feed under the brand name “Profile,” the same name which [...]

In-N-Out Burger has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against the Utah burger chain, Chadder’s (which is owned by the American Fork Company).
In-N-Out is claiming that Chadder’s is copying its business operations too closely – like In-N-Out, Chadder’s has a “secret menu” and also uses similar red, white and yellow signage.
The OC Register covered the case [...]

Office Depot is feeling the heat surrounding its recent warning to investors that sales were down due to a weak economy. The problem? It seems that some Wall Street analysts were privy to the information a week earlier.
According to the analysts, the warning they received from the Office Depot Investor Relations Department re-emphasized earlier alerts [...]

According to media reports and public announcements from the company, software maker SAP has decided to take a different tact in its trade secret litigation with Oracle:
“Yes, we did it… but we didn’t see it.” Um…what????
SAP admitted this week that a subsidiary had completed “inappropriate downloads” of documents belonging to arch competitor Oracle. [...]

We’ve grown accustomed to taking off our shoes and bagging our liquids at airports. But what if the U.S. Government were to recommend another means of heightening national security and take away – brace yourselves – your Blackberry?
While the result would be nothing short of a riot in the work-obsessed United States, it [...]

The FDA and Colgate-Palmolive issued warnings this week about counterfeit Colgate toothpaste which may contain a poisonous substance. Thus far, the toothpaste has been discovered in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Apparently, this product does not contain fluoride. Instead, it contains Diethylene Glycol (DEG). DEG is often described by its more layman’s term: [...]

Media wars are nothing new. News sources often have to fight for stories, sources, staff and advertisers. However, readers in the Twin Cities have gotten to see a whole new level of this competition as two of its most prominent papers find themselves battling in the courtroom over alleged violations of noncompete clauses and the [...]

The secretary who attempted to sell Coca-Cola’s trade secrets to PepsiCo last summer was sentenced today to more than eight years in prison.
The perpetrator of the trade secret theft, Joya Williams, had faced up to 10 years in prison on the single conspiracy charge in a failed scheme to sell Coke’s trade secrets [...]

One day this past week (Wednesday to be specific), an inaccurate blog posting about a delay in an impending product launch for Apple wiped $4 billion off its market value (3%).
As PC World reported, the popular technology blog, Engadget, posted a story claiming the expected June launch of the iPhone would be delayed [...]

The estimates for the total damage to TJX as a result of the massive data breach suffered by the company are beginning to roll in – with the higher ends of the range being between $4.5 and $8.6 billion. For a company with a market capitalization a little shy of $13 billion, this [...]

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott announced a lawsuit against CVS after customer records with personal information such as driver license and credit card numbers were found in the trash behind one of the drugstore chain’s Texas stores.

According to Reuters…
Investigators with the office of the attorney general found the documents in a dumpster behind a [...]

Today Oracle sued competitor SAP for “corporate theft on a grand scale” claiming that its business software rival had stolen copyrighted software and other confidential materials. At the core of the case is that employees of SAP, using soon-to-expire log-in IDs from Oracle clients switching over to SAP, logged into password-protected customer support sites [...]

Over the past several months, Titleist, part of Fortune Brands, has sued a number of retailers and distributors for selling counterfeit Titleist Pro V1 golf balls. These suits are the result of these entities either distributing allegedly counterfeit Titleist Pro V1 golf balls at wholesale or selling allegedly counterfeit Pro V1 golf balls in retail [...]

The U.S. DOJ announced it had arrested a retired Dow Chemical Co. employee for allegedly conspiring to sell trade secrets to companies in China. Wen Shyu Liu, 69, was arrested by FBI agents in Seattle as he walked off a plane from Taipei. Lui, formerly of Baton Rouge, LA, worked for Dow from 1965 until [...]