Levandowski agrees to plea deal over Google secrets
1–10 of 89 posts
Re: Levandowski agrees to plea deal over Google secrets
#2great example of how white collar crime does not get punished. “no more than 30 months” for a theft implicated at multi-billion dollar values. that’s even less with good behavior credit
Re: Levandowski agrees to plea deal over Google secrets
#3great example of how white collar crime does not get punished. “no more than 30 months” for a theft implicated at multi-billion dollar values. that’s even less with good behavior credit
I take a different lesson: when a large company is affected, the small guy gets up to 30 months. When a small-time engineer gets his idea stolen by a big company in a similar way, they have zero recourse.
To be clear, I think both should be punished, but the large corp stealing ideas NEVER will.
Re: Levandowski agrees to plea deal over Google secrets
#4Even if they dont "use" anything he stole, 30 months of someone else's life in jail is a zero price to pay for Uber to get even a small amount of competitive knowledge. Even something like an internal calendar of expected timelines would be super useful and cant be unseen.
Re: Levandowski agrees to plea deal over Google secrets
#5great example of how white collar crime does not get punished. “no more than 30 months” for a theft implicated at multi-billion dollar values. that’s even less with good behavior credit
Is your complaint that his sentence is too light? Or that non-white collar crime is punished too harshly?
Re: Levandowski agrees to plea deal over Google secrets
#6great example of how white collar crime does not get punished. “no more than 30 months” for a theft implicated at multi-billion dollar values. that’s even less with good behavior credit
30 months is a major punishment for downloading a doc that tracks technical goals and doing nothing with it.
Re: Levandowski agrees to plea deal over Google secrets
#7great example of how white collar crime does not get punished. “no more than 30 months” for a theft implicated at multi-billion dollar values. that’s even less with good behavior credit
The lesson if anyone is paying attention that if you’re going to steal $1, better make it a million.... but slow down before you hit Madoff levels. There is a sweet spot north of a million; less than a few billion.
Re: Levandowski agrees to plea deal over Google secrets
#8great example of how white collar crime does not get punished. “no more than 30 months” for a theft implicated at multi-billion dollar values. that’s even less with good behavior credit
I take a different lesson: when a large company is affected, the small guy gets up to 30 months. When a small-time engineer gets his idea stolen by a big company in a similar way, they have zero recourse. To be clear, I think both should be punished, but the large corp stealing ideas NEVER will.
This wasn't "an idea" being stolen, it was years of work and documents, nearly 10GB of it. That's very different from a big company taking someone's idea and recreating something similar from scratch.
Re: Levandowski agrees to plea deal over Google secrets
#9great example of how white collar crime does not get punished. “no more than 30 months” for a theft implicated at multi-billion dollar values. that’s even less with good behavior credit
Two and half years is a hell of a lot of jail time. I seriously wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
Re: Levandowski agrees to plea deal over Google secrets
#10Even if they dont "use" anything he stole, 30 months of someone else's life in jail is a zero price to pay for Uber to get even a small amount of competitive knowledge. Even something like an internal calendar of expected timelines would be super useful and cant be unseen.
I'd argue the opposite that this was extremely expensive for Uber.
The legal nightmare which resulted a loss in 0.34% of equity and combined with having to throw away whatever they had[0] before as part of the deal with Google is not cheap at all.
Anecdotally, I have engineering friends on the Uber self driving team and they talk about how they are just starting over again and how far behind they are as a result of it.
This is definitely a path Uber would not choose to go down again in hind sight. All to say, Uber did pay a significant price for "30 months of someone else's life".
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/uber-waymo-lawsuit-settlement/