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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The amusing thing is that Levandowski comes out of this just fine. As a Google employee, he was required to sign an arbitration agreement. That cuts both ways - Google can't sue him. Google did take him to arbitration, and there was some settlement, but apparently not a huge one. That's over, and Google can't reopen that matter.

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The arbitration didn't involve trade secret claims, which the lawsuit against Uber does. Instead, the arbitration involved poaching employees.[0] Poaching employees is child's play compared to stealing the LIDAR design.

Second, Judge Alsup referred the case the US attorney's office for criminal investigation. If convicted of intellectual property theft (and there's a lot of evidence about this), Anthony Levandowski could be end up in prison for a very long time.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/29/waymo-pursued-arbitration-...

[1] https://www.wired.com/2017/05/googles-fight-uber-takes-turn-...

>"If convicted of intellectual property theft (and there's a lot of evidence about this), Anthony Levandowski could be end up in prison for a very long time."

That's just barbaric. Yes, IP laws serve a public good when they're able to balance the needs of incentivizing creative endeavors with ensuring those endeavors eventually end up in the public domain. But it's not even remotely morally defensible to put a human being in a fucking cage for years because they shared some secrets related to making self-driving cars.

The US already has way too non-violent people in prison.

The amusing thing is that Levandowski comes out of this just fine

I'm pretty sure he regrets what he has done. About half of his money has gone to taxes and the rest has a way of going pretty fast when you have a Google and DOJ on your back. So, I doubt that he will be fine.

He can surely manage... even with half of his 120 million dollar bonus going to taxes.

That's 60 million, assuming that anything prior to that is relatively pocket change. Lawyers cost $1000+ an hour and you need several, for years. Not to mention any possible claw-back, lawsuits for fraud, theft etc etc. There was an article yesterday here; Lance Armstrong has spent some $15 million on his lawyers alone so far.

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