Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 372 posts

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#291

Post by DoctorOetker »

nathanvanfleet wrote: post #136
fortran77 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps he's innocent?

Why would Uber immediately settle?

I don't believe this, but just to entertain the possibility that he is innocent, let's try and come up with some dystopian world where he could be:

Imagine all big-corp actually have a book or ledger of IoU's / tabs / etc so that any work for each other goes untaxed instead of reporting reciprocal work done. This would be a way to avoid paying taxes to the state. Once optimized, what's left? Avoid actually paying your employees, you feed the chicken ... but then you eat it: they pay their employees for a prolonged period of work, then they ask another company to seduce the employee in a crime, then you sue the employee (with or without a mock trial surrounding the second company), then the second company settles. If this happens mutually the money of the employees goes back to the employers. If just 2 companies are on the ledger this may become noticable, so larger cycles (A to B, B to C, C to D, D to A) spread over time and in a different order have the same effect.

(I don't believe it's happening ... yet)

EDIT: added " .. yet"

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#292

Post by rayiner »

kragen wrote: post #70
cortesoft wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Levandowski had only taken the secrets that were in his head, he would have been fine. He took actual code written by other people.

> If Levandowski had only taken the secrets that were in his head, he would have been fine. Kai-Fu Lee wasn't. Evan Brown wasn't (edited to clarify: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/08/12/alcatel_owns_us_emp... ). Don't be so quick to fall prey to the Just World Fallacy, assuming that bad precedents will never be applied against good people. Remember, too, that the founders of Fairchild and of Intel had lots of kno…

Now you're mixing up contractual obligations (which engineers freely entered into) with trade secrets.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#293

Post by kirubakaran »

vonmoltke wrote: post #149
kragen wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Levandowski had only taken the secrets that were in his head, he would have been fine. Kai-Fu Lee wasn't. Evan Brown wasn't (edited to clarify: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/08/12/alcatel_owns_us_emp... ). Don't be so quick to fall prey to the Just World Fallacy, assuming that bad precedents will never be applied against good people. Remember, too, that the founders of Fairchild and of Intel had lots of kno…

> Kai-Fu Lee wasn't. Microsoft sued Google in civil court over a non-compete agreement, not theft. The settlement allowed Lee to keep his job, so other than five months of anxiety I'm not sure how he wasn't "fine". Levandowski is being charged with 33 counts in a criminal indictment. These cases are not even in the same ballpark. > Evan Brown wasn't. I don't know who that is, and there are apparently too many notable…

I searched for: evan brown lawsuit

I got this: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2002-08-05-020805...

Alcatel's PoV: https://everything2.com/title/The+Thoughts+of+Evan+Brown

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#294

Post by random42 »

driven20 wrote: post #288
methehack wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's tragic and awful. I think calling this a "shortcut" though is misleading, at least from what the times is reporting here. It's one thing to own your own brain, it's another take 14K files, including circuit board designs and lidar designs. It's yet another to start using them at new-co that is a direct competitor to old-co. I'm by no means an IP fanatic, but that really does cross over to theft in my mind. But…

Serious question open to anyone. What is the line between "short cut" and "working smarter"? It's not related to this post. Stealing is wrong. It just seems to me the line between being efficient and taking short cuts is really murky.

It depends on which personal, professional, social, ethical and legal boundaries you are willing to cross.

Bribing a foreign government bureaucrat is a "short cut", but it crosses many lines, that are not ok.

Spamming users after buying their email address, cross fewer such boundaries, cause much less harm, and could be argued as "working smarter".

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#295

Post by dymk »

WalterBright wrote: post #276
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…

And yet the largest D codebases (which are also the ones that make companies money) are the proprietary ones which give companies a competitive edge. It's hard to imagine there's no innovation going on there.

https://dlang.org/orgs-using-d.html

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#296

Post by dymk »

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.

And how do you know what to buy?

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#297

Post by kragen »

deelowe wrote: post #275
kragen wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

They did eventually show some “code”, namely signal.h and a couple of other similar files.

However, thanks to iBCS, it is actually possible to run SCO Unix binaries on Linux, and has been since last millennium. That's why interfaces like signal.h shouldn't be copyrightable: the goal of copyright Law is not to give SCO control over code their customers write.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#298

Post by dpark »

amaranth wrote: post #279
dpark wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $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.

Sure. But that’s an absurd response to the assertion that it’s “enough for any reasonable person for several lifetimes”. Sure, you could potentially burn $60 million on private jet service and an army of personal waitstaff. For that matter you could also literally burn $60 million cash in a fire. But most probably wouldn’t consider these “reasonable” behaviors.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#299

Post by kragen »

tigershark wrote: post #235
amyjess wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not such a favorable outcome for engineers It's a favorable outcome for people who want stability. There is huge value in knowing that you're not going to get fired unless you do something actively malicious. Some people aren't interested in climbing, have poor interviewing skills, and don't want to deal with the cognitive overhead of learning a different company's tech stack every two years. Plus, most compan…

You are saying it like having just 4 weeks of paid holidays is a great achievement. I don’t want to disillude you, but when I was very, very junior in EU 5-6 weeks were taken for granted from the first day of work, and in one case I had 7 weeks. Now I an not a permanent anymore, I don’t have any paid holidays whatsoever and I’m much, much happier.

Also, people who change jobs every two years can get unpaid six-month vacations every two years. The idea that the benefit of working at a company for a long time is that you can not work is terribly amusing to me.

Re: Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

#300

Post by kragen »

azinman2 wrote: post #274
kragen wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. I wasn't saying investors are bad. I was saying that being an investor is no more a profession than being a brother-in-law or a Yankees fan.
Post reply on HN