Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets • Hacker News Board

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#271

Post by erikpukinskis » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 1:23 AM UTC

jamespo wrote: post #232

kragen wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think MOStek would have been able to survive in today's legal environment? I don't think so, and that's what worries me. The SCO-Linux litigation wasn't complicated. It was just fraud on SCO's part, under copyright law that was well-established at the time. With the Google/Oracle precedent in place, SCO would probably win. I agree that Levandowski, like weev, is profoundly unsympathetic, but we can't let that…

If he wins, why bother investing in research, just steal someone else's.

No one else has done the research I’m doing. My goal isn’t to get rich, it’s to solve the problems my community is having.

If someone else wanted to solve those problems using my work, I would be very glad and would do something else with my time.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#272

Post by jonathankoren » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 1:26 AM UTC

sdan wrote: post #240

jonathankoren wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was acquired in eight months, and founded specifically after Levandowski and Kalanick had a meeting. Otto looks like a prearranged sham legal entity to justify a huge payout, than a bonafide startup.

"If you buy us, you'll also buy some Waymo code"

I figure it was just two bros figuring out how to funnel a tens of millions dollars into Levandoski’s pocket.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#273

Post by azinman2 » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 1:43 AM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #271

jamespo wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he wins, why bother investing in research, just steal someone else's.

No one else has done the research I’m doing. My goal isn’t to get rich, it’s to solve the problems my community is having. If someone else wanted to solve those problems using my work, I would be very glad and would do something else with my time.

That’s great for you — I don’t feel that way for me. Stealing ideas is one thing, but stealing a complex implementation is another.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#274

Post by azinman2 » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 1:46 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #138

lordlaser9 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawyers and investors provide pathways to the market that allow engineers to build things that have actual value. The idea that engineers like you and I hold all of the tools and training to "create wealth" is too dismissive of those professions.

BTW, calling "investors" a "profession" is profoundly insulting to the professions. A profession — canonically, law, medicine, academia, or the clergy — is a vocation that answers to a higher ideal than mere self-interest and obedience. Investors are just people who bought things.

I’m hardly one to defend finance generally, but I’m thankful to my investors that allowed me to create my startup. Finance greases wheels, and the amount of VC funding is a big reason why Silicon Valley has been so successful.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#275

Post by deelowe » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:00 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #233

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Google-Oracle precedent is not actually relevant to SCO v IBM, because IBM didn't re-implement an interface copyrighted by SCO.

You're right, of course, because it turned out SCO wasn't the owner of the relevant copyright.

True, but the bit about interfaces is also not comparable between the two. There wasn't a lot of commonality between openserver and IBM (RedHat) Linux. It's not like the libraries on one system would run on the other. SCO's seminal allegation was that code was copied between the two, but they never produced evidence. Likely, because there was none. The case was eventually dropped when it was determined SCO couldn't even make a claim to begin with and the rightful copyright holder, Novell, stated they didn't believe SCOs claims. Then SCO went bankrupt and the whole situation just kind of quietly went away.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#276

Post by WalterBright » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:05 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #44

"Theft of trade secrets" is how Silicon Valley was built. Fairchild was "theft of trade secrets" from Shockley; Intel was "theft of trade secrets" from Fairchild. When Camenzind left Signetics and designed the 555 (under contract to Signetics), he was "using trade secrets" of Signetics; in today's legal environment, they could have just ordered him to stick around as an employee and work on a less risky project. MOST…

There's some evidence that the industrial boom in Germany in the 1800's came about because Germany did not have copyright laws. People copied, printed and disseminated manuals on everything.

I've been working on open source projects (D programming language) for 20 years now. There's little evidence that making code free of copyright, license, and patent restrictions has impeded progress and innovation at all. In fact, there's a great flowering of programming languages going on.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#277

Post by dmix » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:11 AM UTC

sangnoir wrote: post #179

dmix wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The prosecution is being handled by the Office of the U.S. Attorney, Northern District of California’s new Corporate Fraud Strike Force I'm curious if this explains the delayed timing... New agency team gets started and looks around for the biggest fish to fry. Everyone already dislikes Uber and AI is big right now so it's win-win. Smart move by the prosecutors if so. (Or it could just be a long process due to the…

IIRC, there was a criminal referral made by the judge during the (civil) Uber v Google proceedings. It probably took time for the grand jury to be set up and complete its investigations after that.

Interesting that would explain it. Thanks

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#278

Post by debt » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:17 AM UTC

beering wrote: post #150

debt wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Levandowski was paid a bonus of $120 million while at Google” God forbid an engineer get paid what he’s actually worth. If anything he should’ve been paid much more . The automobile industry is a multi trillion dollar industry he’d be be disrupting. Honestly, Google may have been paying him to “die” like tech companies do sometimes as rationale for acquisition: to eliminate competition. Maybe he picked up on it and…

Is he worth that much though? Everyone seems to paint him as a genius, but is his value 5x the other engineers on the team? 10x? 100x? It seems like there are plenty of smart and talented people you could hire for your self-driving car initiative that are 1% his price. Or, flipping it around, if self-driving engineers are really worth $100MM+ then maybe they should band together and work for themselves.

“Is he worth that much though?”

Of course he is. He is(was) about to help Google make many billions of dollars of which he and his team would only ever see a very small fraction.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#279

Post by amaranth » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:20 AM UTC

dpark wrote: post #200

onetimemanytime wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Levandowski was paid a bonus of $120 million while at Google, which is more money than any reasonable person will need for several lifetimes. $120 Mil is about half after taxes. Or nothing, depending on the crowd Levandowski hang out with or wanted to join. Private jets, Aspen ranches etc etc cost a lot of money... IMO he felt he would get away with it and become a billionaire. Fame and billions might not let you…

> $120 Mil is about half after taxes. Or nothing, depending on the crowd Levandowski hang out with or wanted to join. Taxes don’t increase or decrease based on the “crowd you want to join”.

I think they meant $60m is "nothing" for that crowd due to the insane expenses involved in living like that.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#280

Post by rayiner » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:32 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #44

"Theft of trade secrets" is how Silicon Valley was built. Fairchild was "theft of trade secrets" from Shockley; Intel was "theft of trade secrets" from Fairchild. When Camenzind left Signetics and designed the 555 (under contract to Signetics), he was "using trade secrets" of Signetics; in today's legal environment, they could have just ordered him to stick around as an employee and work on a less risky project. MOST…

You’re confusing trade secrets with non-competes. A trade secret is specific information, disclosed to employees under a duty of confidentiality, which is misappropriated (usually by a breach of the confidentiality duty), and which is not part of the employee’s general knowledge and experience. I’ve never heard, for example, that anyone at Fairchild misappropriated what might be called a trade secret of Shockley.

That is, on the other hand, what this case is about. Levandowski is accused of taking large numbers of confidential and proprietary documents, not just the general knowledge in his head. That’s certainly not how Silicon Valley was built.