The notion is not that Masimo owned those executives or employees, the notion is that Apple needed the particular skills and expertise of those employees in order to build what they built.

Executives aren't usually the ones with specific technical skills about the arrangement of sensors and so on. If you were looking to infringe like this, it would be better just to poach engineers.

But how does Apple get access to those employees, when they have been dealing with the executives? Through the executives bringing a team over.

Has that been alleged?

LinkedIn sells to data brokers. You can get a list of past and present employees and cherry pick the ones of value.

Still, you don't own people. People should be free to switch employers if they don't like their current ones.

If we going that route, we might be bringing back slavery by the backdoor.

The Masimo case should have been thrown out.

Just imagine you are an engineer with amazing and unique skillset but you were unfortunate enough to pick wrong employer. You get a new offer from someone who sees your potential and could give you tools you need to help you do what you love.

With this kind of precedent, companies won't touch you with a barge pole even if you ticked all the boxes and you really don't want to work where you are.

It's bad for workers and for progress in general.

I phrased my comment poorly. It's not only that they built something similar, it's that they built the patented tech.

Hiring a team and rebuilding something that is not patented, or that skirts the edge of a patent, that's just fine. Hiring the team and building the patented thing is bad, not because of hiring the team, but because of building the patented thing. That it's the same team is just evidence that it infringes on the patent.

Given what is being approved as a patent these days (basically anything goes in), I wouldn't consider this as an exception.

Generally speaking, the patents should describe the invention in such a way that anyone competent in the field could recreate it. So I don't see how the fact the Apple has hired that team has any relevance to this.

Maybe the patents should have been invalidated too.

It undermines any argument that the technology was so obvious it didn't deserve a patent when you are going to the company that owns the patent to poach the staff to implement your own. If it is that obvious, why aren't you just hiring engineers off the open market?