Tesla is now reportedly taking one of its supposedly former employees to court over claims that the ex-employee had stolen company information and for breaching a contract. The sensitive code stolen was reportedly Tesla's proprietary code as reported to CNBC.
Tesla stolen code
According to the recent lawsuit shown on Scribd that was filed on Friday, Tesla now claims that the software engineer by the name of Alex Khatilov had quietly been siphoning the sensitive software code and files coming from Tesla's own internal Wrap Drive system while the engineer was working within the company's official quality assurance team.
The complaint stated that he had first started working for the company back in December and just within days, he then started sending what was noted as "thousands of highly confidential" particular software files directly to his own personal Dropbox account. Tesla's own Warp Drive software is said to be a back-end system that was developed in-house in order to automate a number of the company's own business processes that are related to the production and the selling of cars.
Ex-Tesla Employee claims 'Misunderstanding'
The company claims that the particular stolen material might directly reveal to their competitors exactly which systems that Tesla believes are both important as well as valuable to automate as well as how to continue to automate them. This was said to provide a roadmap for them to copy Tesla's prized innovations as per the lawsuit.
The code that was in question took about 200 man-years of work according to Tesla. However, when confronted by the Tesla investigators back on January 6, Khatilov then claimed that the reason for this is that he had simply "forgot" that he had actually transferred the files directly to his own personal Dropbox. He then elaborated further in a particular New York Post interview that everything was just a huge misunderstanding.
Khatrov worked with Tesla QA team
Khatirov then stated that he was actually instructed to download the said files to his computer because he would be the one working with them as included in his job as Tesla's QA team. This involved helping to be able to automate certain tasks that were related to the company's Safety, Health, and Environment systems. When he then tried to make another backup copy of a certain folder that had contained the cache of massive internal documents, he then reportedly "unintentionally" moved it towards his Dropbox as a simple mistake.
In the interview, Khatrov said that he did not know that there were around 26,000 files out there. Khatrov even reportedly did not know about Tesla's lawsuit until he was reached out by the New York Post. According to the article by Gizmodo, this whole situation is actually not too hard to believe.
Tesla is known to fiercely protect its own proprietary data and even has a strong history of handing out lawsuits here and there whenever it gets even the slightest whiff that its own secret sauce could be at risk of exposure.
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This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Urian Buenconsejo
