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Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

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Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#61

Post by vlovich123 »

xxpor wrote: post #47
hannasanarion wrote: post #41

Why is the government throwing people in jail for leaking trade secrets? Trade secrets aren't supposed to have government protection, that's the entire point: they're risky. If you want a monopoly on your technology, you're supposed to file a patent. Trade secrets were invented as a riskier way to extend your monopoly by giving up government protection. If the government is going to give trade secrets the same protec…

No, patents cover someone even independently coming up with the same idea and making a copy. Trade secrets don't have that protection. You can still steal trade secrets. If you couldn't, you're basically arguing IP isn't property (which is a perfectly valid philosophical position, and one I'm sympathetic to)

The problem is that it would break all employment as we know it. Now all I have to do is get hired on AdWords, steal the algorithm, & start a startup to undercut Google. I can price at a loss because I'm a small fish. Google can't because they've got monopoly concerns. Even outside of that extreme example, this would come up regularly for any pure technology startup looking to exit with an acquisition.

That's not to say it's not necessarily a better system (no trade secrets - all innovation is public) but the monetization strategy to reward novel innovation is much less clear (you can only get so far on support contracts).

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#62

Post by fermienrico »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #14
fermienrico wrote: post #6

More than the 18 month prison sentence, it would have been far better to punish him with life-long red mark on his career to never be able to found, or run a company and never be able to buy stock or any kind of a position in any company. Seems like 18 months will be spent plotting his next big thing and it’s rinse and repeat. Also put an upper limit to his wealth. Say total : $40K. And cancel his passport.

I’m so glad we don’t have mob rule. Society is plenty punitive enough.

Putting people in an enclosed room for 18 months sounds pretty barbaric vs. the measures I am recommending which is basically live a modest free life like the middle class of America.

Why is that harsh?

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#63

Post by albacur »

w0mbat wrote: post #50

This guy had such a sweet deal at Google originally, it staggers me that he'd go to these lengths to steal even more. He was getting a massive salarY, bonuses in the millions, and he had persuaded Google to pay him even more money through a side-hustle company of his while remaining an employee. Then he quits and steals their stuff.

Some people always take the path towards “more.” It doesn’t matter how much they’ve got, if they can find an opportunity for more they’ll take it.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#64

Post by illustriousbear »

w0mbat wrote: post #50

This guy had such a sweet deal at Google originally, it staggers me that he'd go to these lengths to steal even more. He was getting a massive salarY, bonuses in the millions, and he had persuaded Google to pay him even more money through a side-hustle company of his while remaining an employee. Then he quits and steals their stuff.

People in the security industry have told me that this sort of thing often comes down to ego and self-importance.

In Intelligence, people have been caught selling state secrets for 10-20k a pop. The kind of secrets that can land you decades in jail. It makes no sense from a monetary standpoint.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#65

Post by sushshshsh »

Pxtl wrote: post #60

Oh. I hadn't been following the story and had assumed somebody was facing justice over the woman killed by Uber's unsafe self-driving car experiment. ... How silly of me.

You mean the one who was jaywalking and wasn't visible until a split second before she was tragically killed?

Do we afford the same condolences to the tens of thousands of other traffic victims?

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#66

Post by zerocrates »

s17n wrote: post #45

I realize that he's an asshole and his behavior was pretty egregious but as engineers we should not be happy about the precedent that this sets.

What's the worrying precedent engineers should be unhappy about here?

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#67

Post by psyfactcheck »

codezero wrote: post #39
bsimpson wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It blows my mind that there are protestors at San Quentin agitating for prisoners to be released into the public when the prison is one of the biggest cohorts of COVID in the entire region. They literally let people walk out of prison and get on a public bus, after spendings months in close quarters amidst the worst outbreak in the Bay Area.

It's called compassion. Imagine you catch a dangerous virus, and you are in a place where you have literally zero agency. It's as if you are assuming people who commit crimes, or even people who get sent to jail (they are not a perfect venn diagram) aren't empathetic human beings. Most people in prison don't want to randomly infect and kill people. Most of them do not want to hurt families, or friends. Most of them d…

> It's as if you are assuming people who commit crimes, or even people who get sent to jail (they are not a perfect venn diagram) aren't empathetic human beings.

Empirically speaking, as compared to the general population. Prisoners are less empathetic. Empathic concern is highly correlated with agreeableness and agreeableness is lower in prisoners than the general population.

"Results of this study showed that big five personality traits accounted for 19.4%, 18.1%, 30.2% of the variance in three dimensions of empathy, namely, perspective taking, empathic concern and personal distress, respectively. Specifically, agreeableness had a strong positive association with empathic concern..."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5302826/

"Both tests found that while prisoners were lower in agreeableness and extraversion than non-prisoners they were also substantially higher in conscientiousness than the general population..."

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody-els...

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#68

Post by darkwizard42 »

breck wrote: post #26

Why do we have laws for trade secrets? Seems like that lowers wages and decreases innovation. Really bad for majority of people. I understand they are fantastic for minority of people who are shareholders, but are there contrarians who think we should do away with legal protections for them?

Not sure if this comment is sarcasm, but if we didn't attempt to reasonably protect trade secrets the opposite of what you are saying would happen.

If I invest billions in a form of technology or a superior product and it can just walk out the door to any competitor, I actually have a perverse incentive to milk my existing products as much as possible and AVOID innovation due to the lack of return on it and the ability for those ideas to just walk out to another competitor

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#69

Post by oh_sigh »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #18
oh_sigh wrote: post #9

Wow, I can't believe they made him pay back .4% of his compensation.

he didn't get any of the ~600m from the otto sale. It was entirely based on earn outs from progress, and there was no progress, and none of the milestones were hit.

I was talking about his Google compensation which was reported to be approximately 170 million

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#70

Post by cwhiz »

gilrain wrote: post #32
williamstein wrote: post #5

Much more interesting to me is that the article says "he will not need to report until threat of COVID-19 pandemic has passed." and "With no end to the COVID-19 pandemic in sight, it is possible that Levandowski’s latest lawsuit will be resolved before he even reports to jail."

A courtesy not afforded to the largely not-rich, not-white general prison population. I don't think Levandowski should be treated worse, just noting it would be nice if less privileged prisoners were treated as humanely.

It’s a courtesy that is absolutely being afforded to people in California, where this is taking place.

Some people just want to see racism everywhere they look.

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