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Comment by dmerfield | Hacker News Reader

Do you really think he should be in prison for intellectual property infringement?

> intellectual property infringement?

I believe that's a deliberate attempt to illogically equate what Levandowski is being accused of, which is duplicitous, pre-meditated behavior to milk Google out of 100+ million dollars, then take Google's technology to a competitor for another multi-hundred million payout, with something like unintentional patent infringement.

I absolutely believe that if Levandowski is guilty of what he is being accused of that he deserves jail time.

For nine-figure fraud? What would you propose instead?

(It's fraud when you take advantage by ignoring the established legal rules that everyone else is playing by, however suboptimal those rules are.)

Exactly. People routinely get jail time for three orders of magnitude less fraud.

Someone went to prison for stealing $31 in candy bars [1]. At least he only got 2 years: he faced life in prison.

1: http://www.nola.com/traffic/index.ssf/2016/07/candy_thief_an...

There are people in prison for stealing petty items, how would you propose someone that steals something worth millions be punished? Should the fact that it is an idea and information and not a tangible item make a difference?

His theft (supposedly) amounts to nine figures.

The last time something on this magnitude happened was during the financial crisis, and people were (rightly or not) braying for bankers to go to prison.

Are you one of these people?

It's much worse in terms of $$$ compared to most muggings, why shouldn't it be a long term sentence?

This is one of the major disconnects in modern society, stealing huge sums of money by rich middle aged white guys is a minor slap on the wrists but stealing a few dollars by young, black guys is let's send them to the slammer and throw away the key.

It's so blatant and ingrained in the system that you can't even see it.

An obvious difference between IP theft and muggings, however, is that the later also entails threats of violence (and sometimes even assault & battery). That's why robbery is generally considered more heinous than burglary, where the victims are typically not present or asleep. I'd agree though that some sort of dollar figure should be attached to the psychological trauma of being mugged, so that great-enough white-collar crimes can also lead to imprisonment.

I'll bet if you asked most people what they would prefer less, getting beat up or losing $500 million, the would answer the latter.

Which distributed among all Google shareholders is $100 each?

Sure. Basically the guy wronged 5 million people, $100 each. Makes it a significantly greater crime than a comparable mugging of a single victim.

Well, no. Distributed among all Alphabet shareholders it is, from the most recent numbers I've seen, about $85 million each from Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and smaller amounts from everyone else.

Also, in a mugging, the mugged is deprived of whatever was stolen. With IP theft the victim still has use of their IP

There's a difference between illegally downloading a movie instead of paying for it, and stealing technology and using it to bring a competitor to market. The latter is actually taking market share away from the organization it was stolen from, so they are deprived of something tangible.

Not if Uber used his stolen IP to out-compete Google. Then the IP would translate directly into a market opportunity loss.

The difference is the use of violence to threaten someone's life, as opposed to moving some numbers on a screen.

However, plenty of white-collar crime has physical effects. More than a few embezzled retirement funds have led to suicides, for example.

How do you tell someone that a store clerk robbed at knifepoint is much worse than having their retirement nest-egg evaporate because of someone they haven't even met? Serious white-collar crime should be pursued and punished much more than it currently is.

I would happily get smacked around if you promised to 'move around' some significant numbers into my banking account.

Martha Stewart went to jail for making ~$400,000 in insider trading, a far less serious offense.

Actually, they dropped that charge. (Apparently, even if what they thought was true, it would not be considered insider trading legally.). She went to prison for "lying" to investigators about the reasons the sold the stock. 18 U.S.C. § 1001

Absolutely.

What's your opinion on what the punishment should be?

Yes

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