Microsoft says it found a potentially important document in its case against its former executive Kai-Fu Lee and Google in the "recycle bin" of one of Lee’s computers.
According to papers filed with a Washington state court by the software giant, a document that describes terms of an apparent agreement between Google and Lee was "recovered from the 'Recycle Bin' of one of Dr Lee's computers."
The document indicates Google foresaw possible litigation in hiring Lee to head its China operations. It could bolster the software titan's claim that by taking his new job, Lee would be breaking a contract signed with Microsoft, and that Google has been encouraging Lee to violate that contract.
The tidbit about Lee and his recycling bin is the latest twist in a bitter and complex legal dispute between two of the tech world's biggest players.
Google declined to comment. (Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story.)
Last Month, Microsoft sued Lee and Google, charging Lee was breaking a one-year non-compete clause in his contract by accepting his new position. In court papers, Google has claimed that Lee is "not a search expert" and described him as peripheral to Microsoft's business in China.
Even so, a judge has ruled that until at least September, Lee cannot perform work at Google that competes with what he did at Microsoft.
The document Microsoft said it found in Lee's recycle bin states that should the software maker prevent Lee from working at both Microsoft and Google because of a non-compete clause, Google will place him on a paid leave of absence or give him a consulting job for up to a year.
Details about how Microsoft got the document were revealed in a court filing last month.
Lee is known as a pioneer in speech-recognition technology, and he headed up the Natural Interactive Services Division at Microsoft. He also set up a Microsoft research center in China.
Talkback
Such a superior being left this document in his recycle bin. What hope for the rest of us mere mortals
He may very well have emptied his recycle bin but, as many of us already know, clearing your recycle bin does not delete files in Windows, it just marks the disk space as available for writing. Hence, Microsoft may well have scanned Lee's hard drive with a file undeleter in order to find incriminating evidence!
Or... it's manufactured evidence. Because as any good IT engineer will tell you, all the bits and bytes on a disk can be rearranged exactly as you want them to be and also made to appear as if that was always the case (you can only look back in track writing history so far...).