You can steal trade secrets, which is what this case is about.
(If you’re going to suggest a full rewrite of IP and anti-trust law, you should at least have an understanding of the current situation.)
Which goes beyond a civil lawsuit as well, if true, these employees are going to face real, serious criminal charges and possibly jail time. Up to 10 years in federal prison, and Apple has a history of pressing criminal charges.
If Liu actually did exploit a vulnerability to bypass Apple's network security, they may also see federal charges for CFAA as well.
The history of Silicon Valley and most of its innovation come from this kind of thing, and we eliminated non-competes in California for exactly this reason.
Apple having a serious competitor in hardware would be a good thing for consumers all over the world.
Apple’s overzealous secrecy culture starts to become insidious once you become such a dominant force in the marketplace.
At what point do we allow their innovations to bleed into the rest of humanity and lower their margins so humanity doesn’t pay out a 60% tax to them anymore. I think they’ve made enough profits for investors at this point. Id be happy if my Apple stock went nowhere if it meant 20 other companies could grow and innovate new products off the back of it.
(and to develop 5G modem too)
“You may think a monopoly is an overwhelmingly dominant position as a supplier of a good or service, but that’s just naive popular economics! Acshually, according to the latest economic theories (by economists who share our politics), a monopoly is any firm that is big enough to have market power—like pricing power—to do things that can harm a competitor unfairly.”
Us dummies will keep calling that competition.
Today you can consider that "just business", and therefore "part of competing", but the were laws with the intention of allowing/disallowing types of tactics. E.g., you can't compete by leveraging your volume (see attached link), so you have to focus on making your service good.
The assumption made by a these people is that if there are so majy companies getting that big, there must be general disrespect of these laws. And correlating with the undisputed fact that antitrust enforcement did change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson%E2%80%93Patman_Act?wp...
Robinson-Patman applies to every supplier and every retailer, not just monopolies, which is what makes it so difficult to equitably enforce. So it hasn’t been.