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Title    Chinese Wind-Turbine Maker Ordered to Pay $59 Million in Trade Secrets Case
Date    Monday July 09 2018, @04:10PM
Author    martyb
Topic   
from the windfall? dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/07/09/1218225

takyon writes:

Judge Orders Chinese Wind-Turbine Maker To Pay $59 Million For Stealing Trade Secrets

A federal judge has ordered China's largest wind-turbine firm, Sinovel, to pay $59 million for stealing trade secrets from a Massachusetts-based technology company.

Last January, Sinovel was found guilty of stealing trade secrets in federal criminal court in Madison, Wis. The company paid an Austria-based employee of American Superconductor Corp. to steal its source code for software that powered wind turbines.

[...] Sinovel was the largest customer of American Superconductor Corp. And then the Chinese company suddenly began rejecting shipments of American Superconductor's electronic components in 2011. The Massachusetts tech company learned that Sinovel was using a pirated version of the software it made in the wind turbines it installed. The ordeal left American Superconductor in perilous financial shape, and Wall Street analysts wrote it off as dead. The U.S. Department of Justice said that the company lost more than $1 billion in shareholder equity and 700 jobs.

Previously: China's 'Great Brain Robbery' Hacking of US Companies a National Security Emergency

Owner of American Superconductor, Daniel McGahn, discovered a version of its latest, unreleased software being used on a turbine in China. Despite doing everything possible to keep its source code off the internet it was discovered that the Chinese company turned one of McGahn's employees by offering him money, women and an apartment in return for the full operating code.

To make matters worse, when McGahn decided to sue Sinovel for $1.2bn (£840m) and hire a computer security firm to investigate the case, his firm claims the Chinese company hacked the company's system to see what course of legal action it was taking in order to get a leg-up in proceedings.

"Whenever there's a big lawsuit we'll see the Chinese government actually break into that company, break into the legal department and figure out what's going on behind the scenes so they can better deal with that lawsuit," said George Kurtz, co-founder of computer security company CrowdStrike.


Original Submission

Links

  1. "takyon" - https://soylentnews.org/~takyon/
  2. "Judge Orders Chinese Wind-Turbine Maker To Pay $59 Million For Stealing Trade Secrets" - https://www.npr.org/2018/07/06/626683457/judge-orders-chinese-wind-turbine-maker-to-pay-59-million-for-stealing-trade-sec
  3. "to pay $59 million" - https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/court-imposes-maximum-fine-sinovel-wind-group-theft-trade-secrets
  4. "Sinovel was found guilty" - https://www.npr.org/2018/04/09/599557634/it-was-a-company-with-a-lot-of-promise-then-a-chinese-customer-stole-its-technol
  5. "China's 'Great Brain Robbery' Hacking of US Companies a National Security Emergency" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/01/25/0057231
  6. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=27775

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