Ex-Qualcomm man sentenced for trade secret theft

An ex-Qualcomm employee has been sentenced for stealing trade secrets from the chipmaker before he applied for a new job with rival Nokia.

Micheal Laude of Ocean Beach, California, pleaded guilty to stealing source code from Qualcomm and was last week sentenced to three years' probation. Laude will also pay a $5,000 fine and do 288 hours of community service.

Laude had worked for Qualcomm for 10 years, until 2002. In 2 June of that year he requested access to certain source code elements of a number of Qualcomm products, falsely claiming he needed to review the confidential code, according to assistant US attorney Mitch Dembin.

Between June and October of 2002 Laude downloaded more than 400,000 files of code, covering "virtually all of Qualcomm's product line", including app environment Brew, according to the San Diego US attorney's office.

On 3 June 2002 he applied for a job with Nokia and began working for the Finnish mobile company - a major Qualcomm rival - in October of the same year.

Laude later became the architect of Preminet, a Nokia offering designed to rival Qualcomm's Brew.

There is no suggestion Laude had used any of the stolen code at Nokia nor that the code had infiltrated the company. The US attorney's office said Nokia co-operated fully with the investigation.

A Nokia spokesman told silicon.com the company was unaware of the theft and had not benefited from Laude's actions.

Qualcomm declined to comment.