Trade Secrets

AMD v. Feldstein: A Million Copied Files and the Limits of an Innocent Explanation

A District of Massachusetts judge enjoined three engineers who walked to Nvidia after copying tens of thousands of AMD files, holding that improper acquisition — not proven use — supports a trade-secret injunction.

March 10, 2025
An external hard drive connected to a laptop in a darkened office
The volume of files copied to personal drives in the days before resignation did the work that a smoking-gun email usually does. Shutterstock
Educational content, not legal advice. This article explains general legal concepts. It does not create an attorney–client relationship. For your specific situation, consult a licensed attorney.

The forensic record is what makes Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. v. Feldstein a teaching case. Decided by Judge Timothy S. Hillman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in a memorandum reported at 951 F. Supp. 2d 212 (D. Mass. May 15, 2013), Civil Action No. 13-40007-TSH, the opinion arose from a preliminary-injunction fight after four AMD employees decamped, over a period of months, for the competitor Nvidia. The defendants — Robert Feldstein, Manoo Desai, Nicolas Kociuk, and Richard Hagen — did not leave quietly. In the days before they resigned, three of them copied AMD files to personal external storage devices on a scale that turned an ordinary departure into a misappropriation suit: collectively more than 100,000 electronic files, with Kociuk alone copying on the order of a million. That number, more than any single document, is the reason the case is taught.

At a glance

  • Case: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. v. Feldstein, 951 F. Supp. 2d 212 (D. Mass. 2013)
  • Court: U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts (Worcester), Civil Action No. 13-40007-TSH
  • Judge: Timothy S. Hillman, U.S. District Judge
  • Posture: AMD obtained an ex parte temporary restraining order in January 2013; the May 15, 2013 memorandum resolved AMD’s motion for a preliminary injunction
  • Claims: Misappropriation of trade secrets under Massachusetts law, breach of contract and fiduciary duty, conversion, and a claim under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030
  • Core holding: A plaintiff need not prove that a departing employee actually used or disclosed a trade secret to obtain a preliminary injunction; the improper acquisition of trade secrets, with intent to convert them, can itself support injunctive relief and a likelihood of success on the merits
  • Result: Preliminary injunction granted, restraining use or disclosure of AMD’s confidential information and barring solicitation of AMD employees

The exfiltration that defined the record

Most departing-employee trade-secret cases are won or lost on circumstantial inference: an unusual overlap in a competitor’s product, a suspiciously quick launch, a customer who jumps. Feldstein is unusual because the central facts were not inferred at all. They were logged. Each of the three engineers who copied files left a device-level trail, and the aggregate volume was staggering — the court worked from a record showing more than 100,000 files moved to personal media, a figure AMD characterized as a floor rather than a ceiling because the full extent of the transfers remained unaccounted for. Kociuk’s roughly one-million-file copy was the detail that collapsed the defense’s narrative. A person who genuinely intends to take only what is lawfully his does not image what amounts to a substantial slice of an engineering department.

Among the materials were files AMD identified as plainly proprietary: licensing agreements with significant customers and a document setting out AMD’s strategic licensing approach. The presence of specific, high-sensitivity documents mattered, because it answered the predictable defense that the copying was indiscriminate digital clutter — old personal files, public materials, and the detritus that accumulates on any work machine. The combination of scale and specificity is what gave the record its force: not merely a lot of files, but a lot of files that included exactly the kind of competitively sensitive material a rival would want.

For litigators, the lesson is procedural as much as substantive. AMD moved quickly, secured an ex parte temporary restraining order, and preserved the devices before the story could be tidied up. The forensic window around a resignation is narrow and fragile; metadata can be overwritten, drives can be wiped, and “I deleted it all, I never looked at it” becomes harder to disprove with every passing week. Feldstein rewards the plaintiff who treats the first forty-eight hours after discovery as an evidence-preservation emergency.

Acquisition through improper means, not proof of use

The doctrinal heart of the opinion is its treatment of what a trade-secret plaintiff must show at the preliminary-injunction stage. The defendants pressed the intuitive argument that AMD could not point to a single instance in which any of them had actually used an AMD trade secret at Nvidia or disclosed one to their new employer. No use, they urged, meant no irreparable harm and no likelihood of success.

Judge Hillman rejected the premise that actual use is a prerequisite. Massachusetts trade-secret law, like the Uniform Trade Secrets Act framework it tracks, defines misappropriation to include the acquisition of a trade secret by improper means, separate and apart from its later use or disclosure. On that understanding, an employee who copies an employer’s protected files onto personal media without authorization, intending to carry them to a competitor, has already done something the law forbids; the plaintiff need not wait until the secret surfaces in a rival’s product to seek relief. The court framed the operative question as whether AMD could show the acquisition, through improper means, of trade secrets with the intent to convert them to the use of someone other than the rightful owner — and on this record it could.

This is the holding practitioners cite. It reorients the irreparable-harm inquiry away from the hard-to-prove fact of present use and toward the demonstrable fact of improper acquisition plus the risk of future use. That reorientation is powerful precisely in the employee-mobility setting, where the new employer and the departed engineer are the only people who know whether and how the files have been touched, and where waiting for proof of use often means waiting until the harm is irreversible.

The line between portable skill and the company’s files

Every departing-employee case has to confront the principle that an employee may carry general skill, knowledge, and experience to a new job. Engineers who spend years at AMD learn how to design competitive graphics and computing architectures, and that learning is theirs to sell on the open market. Nothing in Feldstein questions that. What the case illustrates is how decisively a documentary exfiltration record removes the dispute from that protected zone. The defendants were not accused of remembering too much; they were shown to have copied the company’s actual files. General knowledge lives in a person’s head and travels with them lawfully. A million files on a personal drive are not knowledge — they are the employer’s property, and copying them is an act, not a memory.

The opinion also touched the related problem of employee solicitation. AMD’s theory was not only that the engineers took files but that the departures were coordinated, with earlier movers helping recruit later ones. The injunction accordingly reached solicitation of AMD personnel, reflecting the reality that a coordinated lift-out of a team can do competitive damage independent of any single document.

Open questions

The opinion leaves the contours of “improper acquisition” relief less than fully mapped. How much copying is enough — does a handful of misdirected files support the same inference of intent as a million? The case answers the easy end of that spectrum and leaves the middle to judgment. The court’s willingness to enjoin on acquisition-plus-risk also sits near the contested boundary of threatened misappropriation; courts remain divided about how far a plaintiff may go in restraining a competitor’s new hire before the injunction functions as a de facto noncompete. And because Feldstein resolved a preliminary-injunction motion rather than a final judgment, it fixes a likelihood of success, not an ultimate adjudication that any particular file was a trade secret.

Implications

  • Volume is an argument. A massive, indiscriminate copy of company files in the days before departure is hard to reconcile with any innocent explanation and can carry a misappropriation showing on its own.
  • Acquisition can be the violation. Under the UTSA framework applied here, improper acquisition with intent to convert supports relief; a plaintiff need not prove the secret was already used.
  • Move fast and preserve. AMD’s early TRO and device preservation locked in the forensic record before it could degrade — the decisive litigation choice in exfiltration cases.
  • Identify the crown jewels. Pointing to specific high-sensitivity documents within the larger haul rebuts the “it was all junk” defense and shows real competitive risk.
  • Solicitation travels with the files. Where departures are coordinated, an injunction may reach recruitment of remaining employees, not just use of documents.

Frequently asked questions

Did AMD have to prove the engineers gave anything to Nvidia? No. The court held that AMD did not need to show actual use or disclosure to obtain a preliminary injunction. The improper acquisition of trade secrets, coupled with intent to convert them, was enough to support a likelihood of success and injunctive relief.

Was the case about what the engineers remembered, or what they copied? What they copied. Employees may lawfully carry general skill and experience to a competitor. Feldstein turned on the copying of the employer’s actual files to personal devices — conduct, not memory — which is why the general-skill defense had little purchase.

What role did the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act play? AMD pleaded a CFAA claim alleging unauthorized or excess-authorized access to its protected network, alongside its trade-secret and contract claims. The case is best known, however, for its trade-secret preliminary-injunction analysis.

Authorities and sources