I was a PhD student at MIT CSAIL a few years ago and recall an incident where a visiting scholar from a corporation who had donated money had to be asked to leave because he essentially scraped every piece of internal data and code in the lab and sent it back home.
What was amazing to me was that he was allowed to return a few months later with the explanation “it was just a cultural misunderstanding”
I want to be careful not to point fingers at a particular country or culture, but that experience taught me that a grey-area version of corporate espionage is _very real_ in academia — an environment that operates with all guards down and no defenses against it.
[Edited to fix tappos]