Congratulations, you've inherited the US Intellectual Property mess. That'll be 5 rupees please...

According to a Merc News item a small San Carlos software company has sued Mumbai police for refusing to investigate the alleged theft of proprietary source code by an employee at its Indian subsidiary.

Basically, the company (Jolly Technologies; no I'm not making that up) outsourced a bunch of R&D to a new facility in Mumbai. An employee there was caught uploading source codes and design documents to a Yahoo mail account. She was confronted and vanished. The cops shrugged, refusing to even register the complaint. Jolly Technologies sued after it couldn't get any satisfaction locally or at the national level.

Indian law lacks some of the statutes that US companies rely on to deter and punish thefts, such as criminal laws prohibiting trade theft. Solidworks, an MA-based software company, is currently working through a civil case in India because they can't get a criminal case together.

If you think this is bad, wait until outsourcing gets really big in China. India at least has a colonial legacy of Western-style jurisprudence and strong bilateral IP treaties with the US and Western Europe. China has... Chinese style. I don't know how well the two will mesh, but I suspect some nontrivial upheavals are in the offing.