Microsoft charges employee with spying

31.01.2009
Microsoft has filed a lawsuit against a former employee, charging him with taking a job at the software giant in order to steal information that would be helpful in his patent infringement case against the company.

When Miki Mullor applied for a job at Microsoft in 2005, he said that he had been an employee of a company called Ancora that had gone out of business when in fact the company was still running and Mullor was its CEO, Microsoft alleges in the suit.

Once employed by the software giant, he downloaded confidential documents unrelated to his job about technology that Microsoft offers to computer makers, according to the suit, filed in the King County Superior Court in Washington. The technology lets end-users forgo the Windows operating system activation process on PCs that come preloaded with the Windows software.

Then in June of last year, while Mullor was still employed at Microsoft, his company, Ancora, filed a suit accusing Microsoft of infringing on a patent related to the technology.

Ancora's lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, is against Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba, but because the technology in question was provided by Microsoft, the PC makers have asked the software maker to defend them against the claims.

Mullor describes a very different series of events. He claims that prior to getting a job at Microsoft, he had several discussions with a Microsoft lawyer and employees of Microsoft's anti-piracy group about the technology he developed. Microsoft said it wasn't interested in the technology, he said.