The property rights in question are the rights of the people who hold equity in the company. The legally unclear part because of inadequate precedent to know how a given case would be adjudicated in a given jurisdiction is what exactly "equity" means in the context of employee ownership in a technology startup (which gets different treatment of e.g. taxes and amortization schedules, "tech" is treated differently by the law in some ways that are crystal clear and in other ways that are less clear).
No one has proposed that anyone be barred from taking an offer of employment (that I've seen and interpreted that way anyways), that would be extremely unpopular with just about everyone.
What people are talking about is whether or not founders and VCs can de facto sell a company in terms of the real assets that people care about without distributing the proceeds to shareholders via a legal fiction that the one company disappeared (was written down or otherwise disposed of) and tada over here some job offers and other compensation appeared in just that amount but for a different group of people.
This is a plot device in the Sorkin film about Facebook. They're in Thiel's office getting the new investment and the numbers guy is like "we're going to get you clean paperwork in Delaware" and Thiel looks up: "So who, exactly, is Eduardo Saverin?" I very much doubt the movie was a terribly accurate portrayal, but that's the TLDR for lay people: one company vanishes, another appears with the same assets, but different ownership.
Trying to make this about the federal government telling people they can't work for Google is bad faith. Stop with that shit.
The founders are employees too. Should they not be allowed to leave a company because they are founders? The entire scenario is that the investors aren’t getting anything because the company isn’t being acquired and the employees are being “poached”.
The founders are making the choice that their equity in the company is worth less (not worthless) than the offer they are getting from their new employee.
In the hypothetical lawsuit the damages would be money, the defendants would be the founders and investors, and the plantiffs would be employees with grants that got written down. No one knows how such a lawsuit would play out because it hasn't happened and looks unlikely to.
For the fucking hard of thinking: it would not be about an injunction against the founders being able to work at Google. It would be about them owing money to former employees.
Enough with this, it's trolling at this point.
Okay, so I am founder of the company, I get VC funding. But I’m not “rich” by any means since I only have the play play wealth based on illiquid “equity”. I may not even have control over the company any more after much dilution.
I get an offer from Google where I am now making real money and have liquid RSUs coming. You think other employees should have the right to sue me because I left the company for a better offer?
The investors aren’t getting anything, in this case Google didn’t acquire the company, they hired the employees. Why would the investors be sued because employees left?