Sk Hynix Essay

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BUSN 513 Case Study 2 Case Study 2 – SK Hynix 1. Within the SK Hynix case, three arguments – property, fair competition and confidentiality – come into play. The first argument is that trade secrets are property and would have belonged to Toshiba/Sandisk as intellectual property; that the research data on the cutting edge NAND-type flash memory was a direct result of Toshiba’s labor and thus belonged to the company. Boatright clarifies further in the text by saying, “it would be wrong for a worker in the factory to disclose the details of a manufacturing process to a competitor, especially if the employee had been sworn to secrecy”; however, Boatright also says that ownership of a trade secret doesn’t confer a right to exclusive use but only the right to have the secret wrongfully acquired by others. In the case of Wexler vs Greenberg, we found that the owner of a trade secret is protected against the use of the information by others when it is wrongfully obtained by impermissible means (like theft). In this case, it appears that with the precautions taken by Toshiba (by limiting the production of flash memory devices to one factory in an attempt to protect the technology from leakage) information was definitely given to SK Hynix under unethical circumstances. The articles in The Japan News only stated that Sugita had been an engineer at Sandisk, not that he was the developer of the technology. In this argument, it certainly appears that Toshiba’s rights of ownership of the NAND research data were violated. The second argument of trade secret protection revolves around fair competition. The key principle of this argument is that companies are put at an unfair advantage when they have expended resources to develop (in this case) technology that can subsequently be used by a competitor without cost. At the very base level, we can assume that
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