58° SUNNY, Yahoo accused of trade secret theft
Last Modified: Thursday, September 29, 2005 at 9:00 p.m.
SAN FRANCISCO - A Silicon Valley technology company is suing Yahoo Inc. for allegedly stealing trade secrets by hiring away 13 key engineers who had nearly completed its interactive speech technology project.
Nuance Communications Inc. said it would ask a Santa Clara County judge Friday to block Yahoo from allowing the engineers to work on the technology it intended to market to Yahoo and other Internet companies.
The case concerns voice recognition technology that Nuance says was at least 75 percent complete before its vice president of research and development, Larry Heck, took a job at Santa Clara-based Yahoo. About a dozen Nuance engineers on the project followed him to Yahoo this month, leading Nuance to conclude that Yahoo is attempting to swipe its technology.
"Yahoo and Heck now plan to replicate this technology for Yahoo, depriving Nuance of a valuable corporate opportunity, and positioning Yahoo as a competitor," Jeffrey Chanin, Nuance's attorney, said in court documents.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Santa Clara County Superior Court, is the latest by a technology company using courts to protect their intellectual turf.
Menlo Park-based Nuance, which produces voice-automation software applications for customer service centers, declined to comment on the suit.
Yahoo, however, said it is not colluding with Heck or the other engineers to steal Nuance's technology.
Nuance said that one day its voice technology could enable users to search the Web with their voices instead of typing on a keyboard.
This story appeared in print on page 6
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