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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

#161

Post by ponker »

bduerst wrote: post #155
ponker wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you cannot compare becoming the world's best self-driving engineer to winning the lottery. This is like becoming Lebron James, it's tremendous talent combined with tremendous commitment.

That's survivor bias though, isn't it? Hard to see the world's best self-driving engineers when they're not getting caught stealing trade secrets and forced to reveal compensation.

Not really, I can say that for example Karpathy is at the same general level as Levandowski and he hasn't been caught stealing trade secrets.

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

#162

Post by throwawaygh »

mayneack wrote: post #89
throwawaygh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stealing, not leaking. It’s not like he was a whistleblower or something. Should he go to jail? Idk. But if stealing food from a grocery store can put you in jail, then a ten/hundred millionaire stealing IP should as well.

Should he go to jail? Idk. But stealing food from a grocery store isn't perfectly analogous to stealing IP. Bringing his knowledge to uber doesn't mean google can't use it. The same is true for digital piracy. Maybe it should be illegal, but it's not exactly the same as stealing an object.

Context matters too, though.

A 10- or 100-millionaire stealing IP to get an n^th bomb-ass house/yacht/whatever might be heavily deterred by prior examples of imprisonment. Or, at least, certainly more deterred than a hungry thief.

If he goes to jail, people might be deterred from this particular type of anti-social behavior.

Why? They can be convinced that fame/n^th houses/yachts is not life.

But! If a food thief goes to jail, no one is deterred.

Why? Food is actually literally fucking life. You cannot deter someone from anti-social behavior that results in a cessation to hunger.

So, respectfully, I think you have things exactly the wrong way around here. Jail is a GREAT deterrent for white-collar crime, but a TERRIBLE deterrent for a many other crimes. We need fewer poor people in jail for sure, but we also probably need more rich people in jail.

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

#163

Post by kyawzazaw »

bduerst wrote: post #155
ponker wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you cannot compare becoming the world's best self-driving engineer to winning the lottery. This is like becoming Lebron James, it's tremendous talent combined with tremendous commitment.

That's survivor bias though, isn't it? Hard to see the world's best self-driving engineers when they're not getting caught stealing trade secrets and forced to reveal compensation.

I don't think that's true. Because they were already being compensated very highly.

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

#164

Post by chordalkeyboard »

kanobo wrote: post #8

He was so brazen in using identical schematic and suppliers. It amazing to think all this is a result of the supplier getting confused from having two clients with identical schematics and accidently cc'ing the wrong engineers.

I’ve seen this happen before in a totally different industry. Now I wonder how many opportunities there are for companies to do this and I wonder how often they get away with it.

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

#165

Post by hannasanarion »

CarelessExpert wrote: post #59
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…

> Trade secrets were invented as a riskier way to extend your monopoly by giving up government protection. You're definitely mistaken on that point. Trade secrets enjoy protection in the law, both in the US and worldwide: https://www.uspto.gov/ip-policy/trade-secret-policy > If the government is going to give trade secrets the same protection as patents (or even more, because patent infringement doesn't come with jai…

Trade Secrets were not protected under US law until 1996. All of the upsides of trade secrets you list are benefits that they have, despite a complete lack of government enforcement, as it should be.

Coke protected its formula for over a century with NDAs and effective security measures. They went through enormous effort and expense to protect the secret, because the law until 1996 said that they were responsible for their own secrets.

Some of Google's algorithms get leaked and they go whining to the government demanding that people be thrown in prison for espionage. It's a bastardization of the purpose of intellectual property.

There is nothing wrong with trade secrets. There is something very wrong with government underwriting the risk involved in building a business reliant on trade secrets. Patents exist as an incentive to publish: you show us your work, we let you have a total monopoly on it for 20 years.

Trade secret protections break that deal. If the government will now give you a monopoly for the rest of eternity on any invention that you label "secret", then there is no reason to publish anything ever, the state of the art stagnates, and the technology industry becomes dominated by uncontestable monopolies with the power to throw you in prison if you look over their shoulders.

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

#166

Post by jonas21 »

bduerst wrote: post #127
illustriousbear wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's likely Levandowski has narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), as is evident by his founding The Way of The Future , which is his own church to worship artificial intelligence.

More like The Way of Shielding Assets From Creditors

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

#167

Post by droopyEyelids »

devonkim wrote: post #157
illustriousbear wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Intelligence screening essentially tries to select for more financially conservative people and in the cases so far people only go that far due to extenuating situations like divorce, addictions, etc. rather than standard American Greed motive. Until relatively recently people didn’t make $500k+ / year as individual contractors or founding random boutique firms. As such, one of the oddities of the US IC demographics…

That reads like a total 'just so story'

Once decision makers are Mormon, of course they're going to hire more and more Mormons. They don't even have to be doing it corruptly, thats just how networks of humans work.

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

#168

Post by hannasanarion »

newacct583 wrote: post #100
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…

Because it's a kind of fraud. If you cheat someone out of $1M by tricking them with a Nigerian Prince scam, you go to jail. If you cheat someone else out of $1M of profits by selling their trade secrets to a competitor, you should see a similar punishment, right?

Intellectual property isn't physical property. Google lost absolutely nothing in the exchange except the possibility of perpetual monopoly on this particular algorithm. Google still owns it, and they can still profit from it, the only difference is that they now have to actually compete.

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

#170

Post by hannasanarion »

rockinghigh wrote: post #142
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…

Theft of trade secrets became illegal with the Economic Espionage Act of 1996. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Espionage_Act_of_1996 18 U.S. Code § 1832. Theft of trade secrets https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1832

Yes, I'm saying that government protection of trade secrets is fucked up. It renders patents completely obsolete: all you have to do is slap a label of "secret" on anything you invent and now the government will protect your monopoly on it until the end of time.
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