That's disappointing. I was never a fan of Steve Jobs, but have always admired Pixar. Oh well, Sony animation has only made 2 movies that I've liked (Hotel Transylvania and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs), so all those employees that were poached by Sony weren't that good.

Bolded 1: Shrek 2 would go on to double that revenue (Over 400 million), in 2004.  Just so ya know.  Again, we're not talking about small time companies/studios.

Bolded 2: Why is that exactly?  Provided you give 2 weeks notice, and handle the departure like a professional, there really should be no bad blood if an employee goes from one job to another.   If they didn't give 2 weeks and just walked, yeah, that's terrible professionalism, and certainly wouldn't warrant a rehire.  But, if they went through the whole process professionally?  It would merely be petty for the previous employer not to consider it, simply because they took a better opportunity elsewhere.

Companies do not have to request permission, to offer a job to someone (I would imagine certain jobs in intelligence etc.., may have different rules).  That's why this law exists, so that the market chooses the value of the job.  If your current employer doesn't value you as much as someone else does, why wouldn't you go somewhere else?  Are you just supposed to be used by your company in perpetuity, taking well below market value...just out of loyalty?  That's ridiculous.  If something you do at work costs your company money, bad press, etc... they typically won't bat an eyelash to dump you.  I mean, take a look at some of the individuals who've been fired for saying dumb shit on their twitter/facebook accounts. 

And if the problem is businesses calling during work hours, the employee should have enough intelligence to request the caller call them during non-work hours.  I've had that exact conversation myself..  It's...just how things work these days.

As far as the agreements are concerned, we'd have to see the actual 'agreements' in writing, but since they weren't exactly iterated and people have 'conveniently' forgotten the context of discussions based upon those agreements...yeah, it doesn't exactly sound like a harmless situation.  But, we shall see.

another point to add on the "why steve jobs was a dick" list.

Yeah, I remember when the entire "no raid" agreement bullshit was leaked. It's crazy what corporations can get away with.

indeed,  how dare they offer people a better salary. 

Funny that you use a Sony movie to make your point.

Well Shrek actually made $492 million worldwide. Indicating Dreamworks got $98 to $148 million, not to mention just as much off of DVD sales, according to your %'s...which are flat out deceiving.

If you look at Shrek 2, it is documented as generating >$360 million of revenue for a single quarter for Dreamworks alone, off of DVD sales and the tail end of theaters.

Dreamworks IS and WAS a very large company.

1.  You are speaking of the future of those companies in relation to the time of this occuring.  Yes, these companies all exploded as digital animation really took off and they had success in the field.  Most of these allegations refer to a completly different time in the industry.  It's easy to look at it with todays eyes and not like it.  I don't disagree that these practices probably limited the incomes of many of the employees in the short term.  But it probably saved many jobs in the long run.  Companies and investors require that a certain amount profit is made regardless.  So, if a company has 50 employees that cost $2,000,000 in salaries a year, and a few employees get extremely large pay increases, and now the total is $2,200,000.  Do you think that the company just says "oh well".  No, they fire 3-4 employees to get it back down to $2,000,000.  What's your plan for those 3-4 people?   Screw them because some company drove up the price of a select few employees?  The reality is that is what happens.  THose few people closer to the top make even larger sums of money and the people on the bottom rungs get screwed.  I am not talking socialism or anything, but businesses trying to keep employees and reduce turn over to stay in business at all.  In the entertainment industry, profits come and go very quickly some times.  So do companies.

2. When industries are as small as this one was, there are few options.  Unlike most job fields that you just go somewhere else or another city and you are off again.  But in small job fields, it only takes one time to ruin all of your future job opportunities.  I worked in a specialty job field for 4 years.  There were only about 200 people in the whole country that did my job.  In the first year I worked in this job, I watched a couple of people jump to other start up companies for the salry and job title boost.  A year later, those startups were failing and those same people couldn't get a job back at our company.  Even though they were good at their jobs, they had burned that bridge. 

I don't disagree that a company shouldn't hold it against you for taking another job at another company, especially if you asked for more opportunity or pay and they said no.  Especially if you gave them proper notice.  The problem is that people at the top are human and take employees leaving very personal.

THis court case won't resolve anything or prove anything.  It won't even change the way people do business.  It will change the way that people percieve companies going forward.

Dreamworks and Dreamworks animation are two different things, even though they are part of the same.  Dreamworks animation was rather small at the time.  The animation division was just starting to be successful.  Shrek's success was a surprise to everyone.  But, your calculations don't work that way for the film industry.  Production companies genrally only see 10-15 % of the revenues from outside of the US back then.  Today, they only see 20-30%.  So, the # wouldn't have grown much from the worldwide gross.  I do agree that the DVD and merchandising sales would have been good.   But, the first Shrek wasn't expected to do that well, so the share of the merchandising would have been much smaller than you think.  Shrek 2 would have been where most of the money was being made.  THat movie did almost twice the revenue and had huge merchandising tie-ins and even bigger DVD sales.