Securing Intellectual Property

Chapter 7. When Insiders and/or Competitors Target a Business's Intellectual Property

Introduction

By definition, an insider can come in many forms, be it an employee, a member of the management team, a corporate board member, a vendor, a third-party contracted manufacturer, or a collaborative partner in a joint venture.

The newspapers are replete with countless examples of the damage an insider can do to a business.

The following is a selection of some particularly insightful cases, which serve to illustrate the various motivations of the offenders, as well as the damage done to the enterprises they undermined.

Lightwave Microsystems

Let us begin with the case of an employee at a privately held firm (Lightwave Microsystems), who occupied ...