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

U.S. prosecutors seek 27 months imprisonment for former Uber self-driving head

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 122 posts

Re: U.S. prosecutors seek 27 months imprisonment for former Uber self-driving head

#41

Post by jxf »

macspoofing wrote: post #30
raiyu wrote: post #23

White collar crime vs blue collar crime. White collar crime steal $179MM of assets and get 27 months of home arrest. Blue collar crime rob a bank to steal $10,000 and spend 10 years in prison.

Non-violent vs violent crime. There is a difference.

Courts have ruled that robbery is not necessarily violent. If you walk into a bank and say "Excuse me, could I trouble you for a moment of your time? Please hand me all the money in the safe", that's not violent: no threat is made, no gun is brandished, and so on. (It is still a robbery, of course.)

https://blog.federaldefendersny.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/...

Re: U.S. prosecutors seek 27 months imprisonment for former Uber self-driving head

#42

Post by runako »

raiyu wrote: post #23

White collar crime vs blue collar crime. White collar crime steal $179MM of assets and get 27 months of home arrest. Blue collar crime rob a bank to steal $10,000 and spend 10 years in prison.

Re: peer comments noting the difference between violent & non-violent crime. The penal code is full of blue-collar crimes that carry exceedingly stiff penalties.

For example, possession of 12 grams of LSD carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years under federal sentencing guidelines.

Re: U.S. prosecutors seek 27 months imprisonment for former Uber self-driving head

#43

Post by dheera »

raiyu wrote: post #23

White collar crime vs blue collar crime. White collar crime steal $179MM of assets and get 27 months of home arrest. Blue collar crime rob a bank to steal $10,000 and spend 10 years in prison.

> $179MM of assets

Uh, that's only if you think they are worth $179M. I might be your competitor, think your software is crap, and worth $0 to me. This is a heavily subjective number.

$10000 in hard cash though is $10000 no matter how you look at it.

I do agree that white vs blue collar crime is an issue but I don't think that's the issue here.

On the other hand though I am dismayed at the fact that this guy is getting more jail time than rapists often get (e.g. Brock Turner). Although it's still a crime, I don't consider intellectual property crime to be that serious in the grand scheme of things. Intellectual property is not even real property to me, and real property is a far cry from human bodies.

Re: U.S. prosecutors seek 27 months imprisonment for former Uber self-driving head

#44

Post by nostromo »

raiyu wrote: post #23

White collar crime vs blue collar crime. White collar crime steal $179MM of assets and get 27 months of home arrest. Blue collar crime rob a bank to steal $10,000 and spend 10 years in prison.

Stealing intellectual property and trade secrets isn't the same as stealing hard assets.

Bernie Madoff was a white collar criminal that stole real money from clients and is serving life in prison.

Google may have been damaged, but they can still use their software that was stolen.

Re: U.S. prosecutors seek 27 months imprisonment for former Uber self-driving head

#45

Post by xwdv »

raiyu wrote: post #23

White collar crime vs blue collar crime. White collar crime steal $179MM of assets and get 27 months of home arrest. Blue collar crime rob a bank to steal $10,000 and spend 10 years in prison.

The takeaway is to favor committing white collar crimes rather than blue collar.

Re: U.S. prosecutors seek 27 months imprisonment for former Uber self-driving head

#46

Post by lostlogin »

macspoofing wrote: post #30
raiyu wrote: post #23

White collar crime vs blue collar crime. White collar crime steal $179MM of assets and get 27 months of home arrest. Blue collar crime rob a bank to steal $10,000 and spend 10 years in prison.

Non-violent vs violent crime. There is a difference.

There is, and if both took $10k the violent crime deserves a harsher punishment. But when 18,000x the money is taken, there is a fair bit of hurt for a fair few people.

Re: U.S. prosecutors seek 27 months imprisonment for former Uber self-driving head

#48

Post by wjn0 »

runako wrote: post #42
raiyu wrote: post #23

White collar crime vs blue collar crime. White collar crime steal $179MM of assets and get 27 months of home arrest. Blue collar crime rob a bank to steal $10,000 and spend 10 years in prison.

Re: peer comments noting the difference between violent & non-violent crime. The penal code is full of blue-collar crimes that carry exceedingly stiff penalties. For example, possession of 12 grams of LSD carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years under federal sentencing guidelines.

> possession of 12 grams of LSD

Reader's note: that's between 50k and 100k doses.

Not that I disagree with your point.

Re: U.S. prosecutors seek 27 months imprisonment for former Uber self-driving head

#49

Post by qppo »

sadfev wrote: post #13
ilikehurdles wrote: post #3

> Federal prosecutors are also seeking three years of supervised release and an agreed-upon restitution payment of nearly $756,500 to Alphabet Inc’s self-driving car company Waymo > Levandowski filed for bankruptcy protection in March, shortly after a court confirmed that he must pay $179 million to Google to end a legal battle over his split from the Alphabet Inc unit. I see is guilty of a few things, but the size o…

No, it was blatant theft of IP and some might consider corporate espionage. He was a high level exec at Waymo, who stole the IP which represented the core competency just before he jumped ship to Uber.

> some might consider corporate espionage

I don't know about "consider," he plead guilty to theft of trade secrets and was charged with crimes defined by the Economic Espionage Act.

But I think most engineers don't know that stealing IP from your former employer is a federal crime punishable up to 10 years.

Re: U.S. prosecutors seek 27 months imprisonment for former Uber self-driving head

#50

Post by ebg13 »

tome wrote: post #28

Top comment: unfairly lenient Second-top comment: unfairly strict https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23989857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23989843

> Second-top comment: unfairly strict

I see that as a misread of the truth behind the second comment. The comment is in relation to "A startup that has its IP copied illegally would be lucky to not be ignored by the feds."

The first comment references unfair leniency in relation to the person doing the crime.

The second references unjust application only in favor of the powerful.

Those are not the same dimensions and are not comparable.

Post reply on HN