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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

> Six current and former Fitbit employees were charged in a federal indictment Thursday filed in San Jose for allegedly being in possession of trade secrets stolen from competitor Jawbone, according to information from the Department of Justice.

Wht makes this a criminal matter as opposed to a civil one?

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I don't know why you are being downvoted. That is a very legitimate question. I would think that since trade secret theft is really simply a violation of a private contract, that it should therefore simply be a civil offense. However, it seems that the people who made the U.S. Economic Espionage Act of 1996 [1] (which is what made theft of a trade secret a federal crime) and of The Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 [2] (which strengthened that) believe otherwise. From the title of those acts, I'd guess they argued it should be a federal crime because of the risk of foreign entities gaining US company knowledge and/or harm to US economy in general.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Espionage_Act_of_1996 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defend_Trade_Secrets_Act

The timing is interesting, assuming it took a few years in draft before being voted to pass. According to a "Jose Canseco" like book called Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, the USSR would frequently attend international trade shows and directly purchase/bribe/steal technology from westerners. But only after the fall of the union did it become a criminal act for an American commit.[0]

Then again, this was also the first period when technology really became ubiquitous. Perhaps it just reflects the spread of tech.

[0] of course treason / violation of oath was a crime, I'm just curious if anyone more versed in history than I can provide more insight.

The late 80s were all hysteria about Japanese firms taking over America. You can see it in a lot of books and films from the era.

There's a really quite odd film called Rising Sun with Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes that has corporate espionage as part of the plot. 1993 release, which was actually just after Japan's economy slowed down.

The original Rising Sun book by Michael Crichton is a good read if you didn't know about it. Haven't seen the movie.

It's a good read, but also full of wild mischaracterizations of Japanese culture.

The original book was published in 1992, and the writing rate for the author at that point was about two years for each novel, so the idea probably originated around 1990.

upvote for the Jose Canseco reference haha

The downvotes are because theft of trade secrets is a crime.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1832

It’s not any more a contract case as stealing a rental car would be. It’s not a contract dispute, it’s a violation of a federal criminal statute.

Not to mention a public company ($FIT) being involved - potentially exposing a broader audience of investors to indirect exposure of the act, potentially causing ripple effects in a public market.

> The downvotes are because theft of trade secrets is a crime.

That is not a legitimate reason to down vote a question.

Sometimes I wish downvotes required a mandatory reply.

Downvoted because I don't agree

(I did not really downvote but you get my point)

Ah yes and then downvoting them might be hell. If only there was a good way to determine when to force someone to reply when downvoting.

They do require a certain karma threshold which is supposed to prevent people without sufficient context in the HN community from downvoting a bunch of stuff. I also think if you downvote beyond a certain threshold in a certain period of time it stops counting them (to prevent flame threads from devolving into everyone destroying everyone else's Internet Points perhaps).

Perhaps the karma threshold needs to be increased.

So only people who can downvote are those that agree with each other? Surely a cursory examination of unintended side-effects was done - it is HN, right?

A mandatory comment as to why someone -1'ed a post should be mandatory. Unless someone is intentionally being abusive/troll, then perhaps we should engage in the lesser popular viewpoints. Not doing so creates one hell of an echo chamber.

EDIT: currently at -1. You're only proving my point, buddy.

You can't downvote replies to your comments. So you are at -1 with no influence on my part. :)

I'm not sure mandatory comments would solve the problem. We'd get plenty of the "I disagree." comments. Could those then be downvoted? Does downvoting those upvote the parent? Could I downvote both. Etc.

I don't know the current threshold but increasing it doesn't create an echo chamber. Look at any thread about gun control in the US and you will a lot downvoted comments on both sides and presumably a lot of highly upvoted comments on both sides as well. Not only that but you can only downvote comments until they reach a certain age. You can upvote them much longer (perhaps forever?). This creates a bias toward increasing votes which itself is a good reason to occasionally adjust the thresholds.

How about stats, similar to serverfault and stackexchange, where you can see how many times the person has upvoted and downvoted?

I don't think the threshold is cutting it anymore - I've noticed a lot of reddit-like behavior with people downvoting things they don't like or agree with rather than things that don't contribute to the conversation; this is balanced out by other people but it's not something that I saw happen 1-5 years ago.

   ... because theft of trade secrets is a crime.

That's an answer to the (perfectly reasonable) question, not a sensible justification for a down vote.

Theft of trade secrets is a specific criminal offense: 18 U.S. Code § 1832 - Theft of trade secrets (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1832)

What about release trade secretly publicly instead of stealing them?

Doesn't that still require theft?

Stealing money from a bank and giving $100 to the next N people you see doesn't negate the fact that you stole the money from the bank. It just makes it harder for you to give it back.

Just because one can make an analogy doesn't make it illegal. We'd have to read and understand the laws.

But to your point: IMO theft is not a good analogy for this. It's not theft, its inflation.

In the bank scenario the bank would still have a copy of the $100. And so would everyone else. It's true, copying money devalues it - just like openly spreading a secret does - so everyone has less than $100 inflation adjusted dollars.

Theft is not a good term for this. I think the crime should be called "Spread of trade secrets"

It is a stretch. We're talking about a bunch of people in a failing company going to work for a competitor so they can continue their careers. Happens all the time and there's nothing wrong with it. Unfortunately, some aggressive entity in Jawbone has gotten busy filing lawsuits, there was one in 2016 against the same people that failed.

I don't see what good it does NOW to go after these individuals criminally, nor is there mention on who has been pushing this. Jawbone was liquidated in 2017. Who, actually, cares at this point? What do they stand to gain with these charges?

> What do they stand to gain with these charges?

A federal prosecutor gets to beef up their numbers by getting some well paid tech workers to settle out of court for a few years salary spread over a few decades of payments.

Interesting, thanks. One thing, the penalty listed here says:

(b) Any organization that commits any offense described in subsection (a) shall be fined not more than the greater of $5,000,000 or 3 times the value of the stolen trade secret to the organization, including expenses for research and design and other costs of reproducing the trade secret that the organization has thereby avoided.

But the penalty discussed in the article is up to 10 years in prison $250,000 in fines.

Is there a different statue at play here?

Right above (b):

> shall, except as provided in subsection (b), be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.

ah, so different penalties depending on whether it's an individual or an organization, but same statute. thanks.

Simply because there are federal laws criminalising industrial espionage itself beyond the component crimes of burglary, trespassing, etc. See the EEA, passed in the mid 90s, and some recent expansions of its powers.

If I had to guess it'd be the existence of a criminal statute penalizing the behavior

Potentially because it could be considered a conspiracy? I can't say for sure but it would make sense. There is probably more information that will be released. I probably still have trade secrets from my previous employer stashed away on a hard drive that I forgot about. But I am not going to a competitor either so I am not concerned.

theft == crime.

I just stole your idea.

theft != crime

> I just stole your idea.

i feel like this may be a category error; it's not clear that "idea" is something which can "be stolen".

at least not in a way that seems similar to (for example) having your car stolen.

subtlety, a lost, and now down-voted, art.

As much I hate to admit it, I have no proof that it was infact my idea. So there’s not a damn thing I can do about it :(

But, if I had in fact patented a practical implementation of my abstract idea, or my idea itself was about a practical implementation of a thing and it was patented, and you stole it, we’d have loads of fun doing a tango dance at the local courthouse. Assuming of course that I could afford the lawyer to dance on my behalf, considering my terrible dancing skills.

Stealing is criminal?

Not all types of stealing is. IP theft is not criminal for instance.

Maybe because this isn't petty theft?

Not all IP theft is considered criminal, so OP is asking a legitimate question. Sometimes it's only civil, like patent infringement or trademark infringement. Other times it can be criminal, like trade secrets (only recently it appears?) and copyright violations.

Yes, I understood it to be a legitimate question. That is why I gave a legitimate answer. The difference between civil and criminal theft is where there is a criminal statute covering the theft that the prosecutor believes was broken.

I'm not sure what petty theft has to do with any of this, though. That's also a crime, and isn't related to the question of whether this issue is a criminal one or purely civil.

I would guess because whatever group of politicians drafted whatever laws are relevant here were given money by corporations who would very much have liked to criminalize the possession of their secrets. Locking up your competitors is great for business.

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