Maybe, we don't have any idea how bad their legal position is. They might be considering themselves lucky to avoid prison, like Anthony Levandowski. 50 years ago doing what he did was normal; it was how Silicon Valley got built. Since then the laws have changed.
Curious if you could supply any specific examples of that being normal in old SV? Of people taking a massive cache of proprietary work, including original research done by colleagues?
Not precisely what you asked for but relevant to this topic of a game engine: A bunch of former NCSoft developers got sued (and lost) for heading off to their new game studio BlueHole with stolen Lineage 3 code and design material. This resulted in jail time.
Basically the entire collection of papers of the Charles Babbage Institute consists of boxes of stuff people took home with them, including original research done by colleagues.
Also, as someone pointed out, Fairchild. And as they mysteriously failed to point out, Intel spawned from Fairchild the same way.
