If someone takes R&D that the company paid massive amounts of money for, then the company can sue for theft of intellectual property, but people should be free to leave to start other ventures with any knowledge they have that isn't covered by IP laws. Even in groups, as they have right to freedom of association.

"Investing in the people who do [R&D]", then suing when they leave, is far too close to owning people.

Not when he left. You can sue an ex employee for breach of contract when he was working there. For quite a few years.

I was just discussing the general principle (in response to the preceding comment) and my opinion about what the law should be, not the merits of this specific case given current law.

And those products are intellectual property. The laboratories, prototypes, documentation, data, and parents are all proprietary and belong to the company, not the individual. All the individual can take with him is his experience and a sense of which direction he could pursue in the future.

That's not nothing, of course. But real products require all of the above in order to proceed to market, and all of the above takes a fairly long time for a company to build up, regardless of the experience of the people it hires, because the most those people can do is reduplicate their efforts without the mistakes, and even then pure reduplication is illegal because of parents etc.