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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
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday August 07 2020, @12:05PM
Want to go to court? Be ready for a 15-year delay before you get a judgment. And that's a big problem for companies that outsource to shitholes with a broken legal system - effectively no legal recourse when they incorporate your stuff into competing products.
Then there's China. Massive counterfeiting operations run by the same plants that are making your product under contract, so they become your biggest competitor, and you're paying them for that "privilege ". And subsidizing their Muslim prison camps. A million prisoners. Funded with exports.
But back to India - 600,000,000 people without an indoor toilet. You could literally stand them in line and they'd reach to the moon - and this was before social distancing and the pandemic. And it will never be fixed because the tax base isn't there to pay for it, because everyone dodges taxes. Their choice, but they have to live with the consequences, including infrastructure that fails every year when the rains come.
Way back when, a local company had designed a working ultra cheap Linux tablet for the masses, tried to get it manufactured in India, got fed up after 2 years of constant demands for bribes at all levels, and abandoned the project. That's typical. Wonder how Apple is going to do, having moved IPhone production there. Maybe they have enough clout to actually get things working normally, but it's still going to be a problem for everyone who has to deal with a country where the legal system is broken. Like Russia. Like China.
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