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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday August 06 2020, @03:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the doing-time dept.

Ex-Googler Levandowski gets 18 months in prison for trade-secret theft:

Ex-Google engineer Anthony Levandowski yesterday was sentenced to 18 months in prison following his March guilty plea for stealing a confidential document related to Google's self-driving technology.

Levandowski's lawyers last week asked a judge in US District Court for the Northern District of California to let him off without any prison time, arguing that a year of home confinement, a fine, restitution, and community service would be sufficient punishment. The federal government asked for a 27-month prison sentence.

While handing down the 18-month sentence, US District Judge William Alsup said that a sentence without imprisonment would give "a green light to every future brilliant engineer to steal trade secrets," according to a Reuters report. Levandowski was originally charged with 33 counts of stealing trade secrets by downloading thousands of documents to his personal laptop in December 2015 shortly before he left Google to work on his startup, Otto, which was acquired by Uber for a reported $680 million in August 2016. In a plea deal, Levandowksi admitted to stealing one document called "Chauffeur TL weekly updates," which tracked the progress of Google's "Project Chauffeur" that later became Waymo. Prosecutors dropped the other charges.

Levandowski won't have to serve the sentence right away, as Alsup ruled that he can go to prison after the coronavirus pandemic subsides, according to Reuters and other news outlets.

Levandowski also must pay $756K to Waymo


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 06 2020, @06:58PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday August 06 2020, @06:58PM (#1032418)

    So, it sounds like these were documents he didn't require access to as part of his normal work duties.

    Doesn't matter, really, once you've triggered the corporate lawyers and they think you are a target worth destroying, they're coming for you no matter what.

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