amusing
smells IWed here doesn't it?

LOL
I've heard of intellectual property, but thinking you own the minds of your employees is truly taking the fucking piss. "Oh noes! They be taking their knowledges with them!"

It's worth noting that this story originally came from the Daily Mail, so it's probably worth taking it with a large grain of salt until information from additional sources is available.

Not enough details to actually comment on this story.
Did they take some of the source code? Nothing?
Until we know the details it's impossible to know who's in the right here.

Well that is a huge economics problem with some companies. If you train them and they leave with that information they've learned from you surely you would be angry.

That only tends to be a problem for companies that treat their employees poorly enough that they jump ship at the first opportunity. For companies that offer better salaries and working conditions it's a great situation.

Yeah but all this, like most things on this forum, is based on the assumption that Codemasters are total dickheads.

In technical terms this is what's known as tough shit. Publishers treat their devs like shit then have the audacity to try and sue when that's reciprocated? Fuck 'em.

As I touched on with my first post, I'm of the opinion that this whole story should be taken with a grain of salt until more details become clear. It could very well be that the employees were using information that fell under an NDA, it which case Codemasters would be in the right. However, if it's just about talent migrating to a better environment... well, Navagon just summed up that situation pretty well.

Well, as a company, you have a couple of choices then:
1. Enslave your employees and chain them to their desks. This ensures that they can't ever leave your company, but is likely to cause some amount of negative reaction from the world in general.
2. Lobotomize all employees leaving your company. This too, is likely to bring about repercussions of a most unwelcome kind.
3. Ensure that none of your employees learn anything while they're with your company. The best way to ensure this is to have them play Tetris all day. This is also the best way to ensure that your company will go bankrupt very very quickly.
4. Treat your employees with respect, give them proper working conditions and competitive salaries, in order to minimize the number of employees seeking other employment. Be sure to train them properly, and keep them up to date of new technology, so they don't feel that their market value is being diminished by working for your company. When some of them do leave, as some of them will, take it as the part of business life that it is, and remember that some of the people you hire will bring knowledge they got while working for other companies.

Could be, although Codemasters is based in the UK, and my understanding is that non-compete agreements are pretty limited in their scope there. Not to mention that if the new company is based in a different country then there may be even further limits on the enforceability of any non-compete.

If that is the case then it should have been explicitly stated. After all it would be the centrepiece of the lawsuit. Instead the focus seems to be on staff being 'poached' which has left Codemasters and their F1 game up a certain creek without a paddle.

Well, more accurately, that was the Daily Mail's take on the lawsuit, which was then summarized further by the site that was linked to in this thread. Basically information is pretty scarce and unreliable right now, so it's good to remain open to all reasonable possibilities.