Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Anyway, Levandowski was a lousy leader, and was really detrimental to Uber's ATG. He bloated ATG from fewer than 100 people to more than 2000 within less than a year, without paying the slightest attention to culture. As a result, the number of people grossly exceeded the quantity of work. Political infighting quickly became rampant. Chaos ensued. Morale nose dived. Worse yet, instead of aligning and uniting the teams in Pittsburg, he created a huge fight with the Pittsburg teams, so much so that Travis, then the CEO of Uber, had to fly to Pittsburg every few weeks to resolve the conflicts.
It's sickening to even think about what he did in Uber.
So if you were a CEO looking to hire a senior guy for autonomous vehicles, he was one of the most senior in years of experience, pretty much nobody was working on autonomous vehicles prior to the Grand Challenge.
Coming in with wunderkind status gives you a lot of leeway with some people, and things need to be pretty bad before the people that hired you will admit that they made a mistake, hired the wrong person, and paid them way too much. Admitting such a mistake does some damage to your ego and reputation of hiring problem solvers. Plus, by many accounts he was producing decent results- after all, he's led some pretty famous projects, and most of the projects weren't regarded as failures, so why should he be regarded as a failure? Other than stealing IP and being a dick, he's not usually called a loser or a failure.
Uber's leadership and corporate culture were toxic and ethically dubious long before Levandowski came along. It seems to me like he fit right in. No wonder Uber bet so much on that guy.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/10/report-a-manager-at-ubers-...
Levandowski was paid a bonus of $120 million while at Google, which is more money than any reasonable person will need for several lifetimes. This was actually a running joke at Google (while I was still there) to describe $120M as "1 Levadownski". Like Sundar one year was described as earning "only 1.7 Levadownskis" (he got paid $200M one year).
Why someone would risk jail time doing something so clearly wrong (taking material trade secrets from an employer) for even more money is just staggering to me. Even if he escapes prison time the stress and cost of a protracted criminal trial is huge. The loss of reputation is likely permanent.
I get why some high fliers have big egos and they privatize their success (even when pure dumb luck can be a huge factor). This is the hubris part. Right or wrong, that belief in your own abilities is almost a prerequisite for disruption.
The interesting part is how he "cheats". Like he clearly went to efforts to cover his tracks. Those aren't the actions of someone who felt they didn't do something questionable. So at this point, it's not about the hubris of the individual, it's about being perceived as being gifted, intelligent, a visionary and so on.
Honestly it makes me glad when such charlatan have their almost inevitable fall from grace.
1 Levandowski = 1.3 Rubins [1]
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal...
It looks like many googlers fondly remember the Eric era.
It is a shame Google does not have better executives, for years it has acted like a headless chicken.
. . .
On second thought... https://www.wired.com/story/anthony-levandowski-artificial-i...
Restitution to injured parties is available for the charges here on top of fines, and the DoJ has also included a non-specific criminal forfeiture allegation against any property used in, intended to be used in, or directly or indirectly derived from the charged offenses.
So if he made anything (or deprived anyone of any value) from his crimes, he could pay that back on top of the fines, potentially.
There are no further civil avenues.
In particular 'for even more money'.
You are assuming that the motivating factor was money. People do all sorts of things when no money or financial gain is involved at all. Sometimes just to enjoy the pleasure of being aberrant. Take hacking as one example.
That doesn't excuse stealing, but it might not be as simple as greed or hubris.
You want to see him strung up for ripping off a company whose does the same thing and he probably witnessed and was taught to do it there(directly or indirectly).
Those who downvote this are doing so because You don't believe Google does exactly what Anthony did? That Google is a company who does no evil?
What I'm saying is relevant and truthful and as noted clearly well documented!
It may also be because your comments contain grand claims and high indignation without much information. That doesn't mean you're wrong, of course, but given that everyone's priors here are formed by past internet discussion, it does increase the likelihood, and comments that fit that description tend to get downvoted.
There is not and there should not be any hard cap on what is 'reasonable' in a lifetime. Maybe someone wants to make money so they can get their name on a wing of a hospital or fund their alma matter. Forget the 'good cause means it's ok' angle as well. Maybe you are ok living a particular way but that doesn't mean others are or that you are reasonable and they are not.
Also plenty of good comes out of the world (as well as bad) because of people's pursuit of money, fame etc. If everyone was just content with very little many things we enjoy today would not exist. And maybe that wouldn't matter to you (not you but 'you') but just the same I don't like sports but I recognize others do and find enjoyment in their lives (or video games).
Perhaps.
However, one of the ways prosecutor maintain a 95%+ conviction rate is to only pursue cases they are extremely confident they could win in court. And sure, just because someone loses in court or pleas out doesn't mean they are actually guilty, but it's the best system we have.
Imagine all big-corp actually have a book or ledger of IoU's / tabs / etc so that any work for each other goes untaxed instead of reporting reciprocal work done. This would be a way to avoid paying taxes to the state. Once optimized, what's left? Avoid actually paying your employees, you feed the chicken ... but then you eat it: they pay their employees for a prolonged period of work, then they ask another company to seduce the employee in a crime, then you sue the employee (with or without a mock trial surrounding the second company), then the second company settles. If this happens mutually the money of the employees goes back to the employers. If just 2 companies are on the ledger this may become noticable, so larger cycles (A to B, B to C, C to D, D to A) spread over time and in a different order have the same effect.
(I don't believe it's happening ... yet)
EDIT: added " .. yet"
https://sc.cnbcfm.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/editor...
If he didn't actually deliver / use Google's files at Uber (I believe they actually may have found he didn't?), he was clearly trying to get the tech in his head and build a crib sheet for what was to come later.
In any case, today he paid $2m in bail and is wearing an ankle bracelet GPS monitor.
It could've just been part of the big ego'd power struggle that occurred on the project and saw the exit of many early stage employees, but I also wonder if he had a point, looking back today at the stages the project went through. It's hard not to feel like they thought they were close to launch, only to hit some roadblocks and need to rebuild major chunks of it. Speculation. But they're a huge company with a product that is at risk of getting usurped at this point.
https://www.businessinsider.com/most-luxurious-private-jets-...
https://www.beautifullife.info/automotive-design/worlds-top-...
If you're aiming for the billionaire narcissist bracket - because of course it's the lifestyle you deserve - 120 million is chump change.
"almost inevitable?" -- really?
Seems like most of them get away with it. That's what makes them so frustrating, and why it's such a big story when they do get punished (even inadequately).
But yeah I think that I would have the common sense to just bow out with just a few years of that comp and be happy, but the fact that I would be satisfied by that probably means I wouldn't go to the lengths that people like that go to get there in the first place.
And that includes the kind of psychotic back stabbing and self promotion, but also all the hard work required as well.
Even if you think the ethics are irrelevant - a reach on its own, but let's go there for the sake of argument - how often does the money thrown at these people generate lasting and reliable ROI?
Or any ROI at all, in fact?
Again, I don’t know details here but if you see past corporate crime stories, people got rewarded on the way to the end, which served as positive reinforcement for them to think they are doing the right thing.
For example, the conflicts of interest — and eventual rewards — at 510 Systems were quite possibly a major positive reinforcement.
https://www.wired.com/story/god-is-a-bot-and-anthony-levando...
That's actually part of espionage 101- pressuring a person through each little step on the ladder so that they can get all the way up to straight-up criminal behavior without ever doing anything that much worse than they did the week before.
I'm not saying this is an incident of espionage, just that espionage folks have recognized what you pointed out, and basically made it a step by step formal process.
God forbid an engineer get paid what he’s actually worth.
If anything he should’ve been paid much more. The automobile industry is a multi trillion dollar industry he’d be be disrupting.
Honestly, Google may have been paying him to “die” like tech companies do sometimes as rationale for acquisition: to eliminate competition.
Maybe he picked up on it and decided to move on.
Google doesn’t own technology he invented.
Of course he is. He is(was) about to help Google make many billions of dollars of which he and his team would only ever see a very small fraction.
I believe bad things happen when someone gets really greedy and tries to find ways around basic rules.
$120 Mil is about half after taxes. Or nothing, depending on the crowd Levandowski hang out with or wanted to join. Private jets, Aspen ranches etc etc cost a lot of money... IMO he felt he would get away with it and become a billionaire. Fame and billions might not let you enjoy your tens of millions.
Taxes don’t increase or decrease based on the “crowd you want to join”.
The response assumed that he was NOT a "reasonable person" and wanted to move to the billionaire status. Almost did it, atually
Levandowski is also responsible for perhaps the first incident of Google’s self-driving car causing a freeway crash, and he circulated a video of it to the team:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal...
Levandowski wasn’t the only Chauffeur engineer to collect gobs of cash and run. The founders of Nuro headed out with $40m each. Chris Urmson and Bryan Salesky now run dueling start-ups.
What does accountability at Google even look like? Is it just too daunting to stand up and raise a flag?
Fairchild was "theft of trade secrets" from Shockley; Intel was "theft of trade secrets" from Fairchild. When Camenzind left Signetics and designed the 555 (under contract to Signetics), he was "using trade secrets" of Signetics; in today's legal environment, they could have just ordered him to stick around as an employee and work on a less risky project. MOSTek was built out of "trade secrets" of Motorola. Unix was only released under a source licensing agreement, and for decades the Lions book, the bible for Unix kernel engineering, was illegal and could not be printed legally, because it contained "trade secrets" (and copyrighted code!) of AT&T. (Or, rather, Western Electric.) Indeed, economists have published a number of papers arguing that that California's prohibitions on non-compete agreements and on employer ownership of private work product underpinned the 1970s–1990s shift from Boston to Silicon Valley.
So this movement toward resolving such conflicts in the courts, instead of by companies competing to out-innovate one another, is very troubling. Investors, and in this case Google upper management, are killing the goose that laid the golden egg; they want to shift power from engineers, who make things, to lawyers and investors, who specialize in getting paid for them.
This is probably a major factor in the widely-observed shift of the center of innovation from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen, where shanzhai ("theft of trade secrets") is a way of life.
I live in a poor country which is poor mostly because the established economic powers are able to strangle new centers of wealth creation in the cradle, using the government and laws. Don't let that happen in your country.
Engineers create wealth. Lawyers and investors just compete to privatize it.
It would be one thing if he just left with his own work. That would be more understandable.
(Edited to clarify and correct spelling.)
It's incredibly significant. Those cases you mentioned above were civil suites; this is a criminal charge brought by prosecutors. Totally different ball game.
Salary negotiation is an excellent example of your blinders in this. I suppose you see it as the employee gets X dollar, employer loses X dollars, so it must be zero-sum. That get's too hung up on the easily tangible piece of the transaction and ignores the more complex context in which the negotiations take place. In truth, both employee & employer get something out of it. Obviously the employee gets a better salary. The employer, by providing the employee with the things that help make them a satisfied worker, gets higher productivity than otherwise, and perhaps a higher guarantee that the employee will stick around. Both win. They are cooperating, literally part of what game theory, from where the entire concept of zero sum comes, regards as integral to many positive sum outcomes.
Do you have proof of this? Claiming all those companies were founded by people who stole confidential documentation from their previous employers is a pretty bold claim to make without evidence.
Kai-Fu Lee wasn't. Evan Brown wasn't (edited to clarify: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/08/12/alcatel_owns_us_emp...). Don't be so quick to fall prey to the Just World Fallacy, assuming that bad precedents will never be applied against good people.
Remember, too, that the founders of Fairchild and of Intel had lots of knowledge in their heads that had been discovered by their left-behind coworkers at Shockley and Fairchild. They probably had documents in their homes — by accident if nothing else, if the history of recovered source code printouts from that epoch is anything to go by — but because there was no prosecution to find out about it, we'll probably never know.
Microsoft sued Google in civil court over a non-compete agreement, not theft. The settlement allowed Lee to keep his job, so other than five months of anxiety I'm not sure how he wasn't "fine". Levandowski is being charged with 33 counts in a criminal indictment. These cases are not even in the same ballpark.
> Evan Brown wasn't.
I don't know who that is, and there are apparently too many notable people named "Evan Brown" for me to figure it out without more context.
I got this: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2002-08-05-020805...
Alcatel's PoV: https://everything2.com/title/The+Thoughts+of+Evan+Brown
trying to clearly define what exactly are ideas owned by the employer has to fail on principle. especially when you consider that even a new grad is being hired with the expectation that they are bringing ideas and techniques to bear that they developed someplace else.
Or just leaving the industry, or lifetime employment with a single company — hardly unthinkable; in fact, it was the rule in the US within living memory, and I've worked at companies where the majority of engineers were lifers. This would be a very favorable outcome for investors in your company: they get the fruits of your million-dollar ideas for the rest of your life, and they only have to pay you a somewhat-below-market salary, since you have no negotiating power to demand a higher one. It's not such a favorable outcome for engineers, or for hacking as a vocation or programming as a profession.
It's a favorable outcome for people who want stability. There is huge value in knowing that you're not going to get fired unless you do something actively malicious.
Some people aren't interested in climbing, have poor interviewing skills, and don't want to deal with the cognitive overhead of learning a different company's tech stack every two years. Plus, most companies tie vacation time to seniority, so being able to stay at a company for 10+ years means you'll get to have four weeks of vacation every year, while people who switch jobs every two years will always be stuck at two.
If I work in medical x-ray machines, say, when I quit, I don't go to another medical x-ray company. I can still work in embedded systems, though - it's a really big world out there.
Your argument works a bit better for Shockley and Fairchild, because semiconductors was not a big world then. And it perhaps works for Levandowski today, because self-driving cars skills aren't super portable to other industries. I could see some market for his skills in more general robotics, though.
Is there any country in the world that still prioritizes freedom over having a massive regulatory state? It would surprise me.
American workers gained workplace protections through unions and the threat of a communist revolution, which forced the government to relinquish the use of its coercive powers against strikers. Only later did (limited) workplace protections become law.
When I lived in the US, I thought like you do. Now I've seen the other side of the coin.
And gun battles[1][2][3][4][5]. But now we just commemorate by buying mattress on sale on Labor Days.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrin_massacre
Also, please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological battle. That's always tedious and usually nasty.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: looks like we've had to ask you this a bunch of times before. Continuing to violate the site guidelines will get your account banned, so would you mind reviewing them and using HN as intended? We'd be grateful.
edit: also, could you explain why philosophy caused you to move around the world? You mention this on your web page ;)
I really wish someone would point to an example where any “freedom stealing” law in a democracy was the came from a bureaucrat rather than outside lobbyists. Because the way this common claptrap implies that somewhere there’s a big board where there’s a monthly quota on new regulations and laws, or there’s some other personal incentive.
It's par for the course for internet libertarianism. They have a thirteen year old's YA-dystopian-fiction-novel understanding of how society works.
Many readers are locked and loaded for such responses to begin with, and since firing back provides a certain release, they don't tend to scrutinize the text they're reacting to very closely to see if it really does say what they're reacting to, or what other interpretations there might be. The HN guidelines specifically ask users to do the latter ("Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."), but that requires a slower reflective process than is available in the locked-and-loaded case.
This is compatible with what nkurz said, because shorter comments admit of more interpretations. It also implies a mitigation that, in practice, seems to work: include disambiguating information to rule out provocative interpretations. The more provocative a possible interpretation is, the more flame retardant you probably need to pack with your message. This sucks, because it makes you responsible for deflecting things you don't mean, which can be a tedious and political way to communicate. In practice, though, if you really aren't issuing a provocation (e.g. dumb ideological boilerplate), it often suffices to share more of your thought process, especially anything unusual or unpredictable about it, and that tends to make for a more interesting comment too.
It may be started by lobbyists, but bureaucrats while drafting something will come up with some good ideas of their own.
From what I remember as a high school yearbook editor, 12 point is standard text font size. (Yes, I know MS Word popularized 10 point.) Failing to specify a minimum legible font size would allow someone to print labels that were illegible thus defeating the purpose of disclosures, while maintaining technical compliance. It is an unreasonable expectation that people when purchasing food products at a grocery store to carry a 200x microscope. Given that you want to ensure legibility, I would certainly hope that a regulation would exist that specified what was legible was for say 90+% of the sighted population, and was still accessible to technological pocket readers for the blind.
In a related example, the FDA respecified nutrition labels due to lobbying about its illegibility and confusing layout. Now it’s larger, high constraint, and has simpler headings around total sugar. I remember when they changed, and it was due to successful lobbying from consumer, health, and senior citizen advocates. You can read about the history of nutrition labeling at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK209859/
Now to respond to the point that bureaucrats are incentivized to minimize freedom. What freedom is being minimized? The freedom to deceive consumers? The freedom to obscure? These aren’t really freedoms in the public interest.
More importantly, you even conceded that the regulation was started by lobbyists, when the original argument was the a bureaucrat was being “incentivized” to steal Freedom(tm) from the populace.
Laws aren’t just vague ideas. They’re technical specifications. Sometimes these specifications are at odds with each other. Sometimes they’re over broad, or ineffective at achieving the original goal. Sometimes they’re simple regulatory capture, (Barber and hairdresser licensure does little to protect the public, but limits the number of practitioners. Same with revoking barber licenses for felons. But do you know who is the biggest supporter of cosmetology licenses? Cosmetologists.) Even the regulators know this, but simultaneously are powerless do anything about it, as they are not the ones who pass the laws. For instance, SF Planning commission famously posted this video about trying to open a restaurant in San Francisco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOreHYVTHGA
There is more evidence that police have ticket quotas than there is that bureaucrats have regulation quotas. (Show me a beat cop that still has his job after refusing to write any tickets, but rather simply uses his professional discretion to give verbal warnings.)
Yes, it would not make sense that there are requirements to produce impacts that aren’t publicly noticeable, particularly when there are complaints of scarce resources.
Regardless, people have bosses and work multiplies. Maybe no one has no idea what they are doing, but someone has to have some self reflection that it is harmful.
I emphatically reject that notion, both from the perspective that that regulations and regulatory enforcement are intrinsically harmful, and from the perspective that self reflection of enforcers demoralizes them. Quite the contrary, people self deceive themselves all the time. No one ever the bad guy in their own story.
Sure. Maybe someone sometime gets fails to rationalize their actions for a while, and quit, but they are by far the exception, because if they weren't you'd have high turn over and an inability to recruit replacements. Then, even under those circumstances you'd eventually end up with self selected, self perpetuating group. That's just survivorship.
Many or most adults in the U.S. operate at the level of what we expect of children, but not what we expect of adults.
I only specify the U.S. because it's what I know directly.
(I suspect European adults overall are better socialized to behave in an adult way, but are not necessarily actually any wiser than American adults. Just on average. There is an enormous variation from person to person.)
edit: I feel like this needs an example. I'm not saying American adults are incompetent at their jobs, for example. I'm saying they hold childish beliefs, like believing in Santa Claus, but not that one in particular. In other words, they lack intellectual hygiene. Another good example is what came up earlier in the thread: people rationalizing their bad actions so that they are not bad in their own "story."
I don't know what a relieving letter is and I only know of a bond as a debt instrument. Can you explain?
A reliving Letter is document that your employer must (effectively) provide so you can resign and work for some one else, they can hold you hostage.
Bond in this term refers to "An employment bond contains a clause which requires the employee to serve the employer compulsorily for a specific period of time or else refund the amount specified as bond value."
Basically an indentured servant. A friend of mine who was head of UNI described it as "horrific".
UNI is a global union so they also work with textile workers in poor countries so describing working practices for professionals in India as "horrific" shows how bad it is.
What is the enforcement mechanism for the relieving letter? Like, what stops someone from getting a new job without having a relieving letter from the prior employer?
Is this common in India for engineers?
You said the US does ask for relieving letters but I think from context you mean "at least the US doesn't ask for relieving letters." Right?
… or a young graduate paying back a university bursary.
Not always evil.
As an American, it makes me think of people who would charge 7(?) years of labor on a farm in exchange for passage to America in the 18th century. Sounds like a great deal to me!
People generally don't enter into agreements unless it's beneficial for both parties.
The difference is that capital equipment is not the crucial limiting resource for programming, or even for building self-driving cars.
Consider a steelworker: perhaps he earns US$80,000 a year, but he is operating two million dollars' worth of steel mill. (More accurately, a hundred steelworkers are collectively operating a steel mill worth two hundred million dollars.) If he (and his coworkers) were to save 10% of their salaries, they could build their own steel mill after 250 years. It's understandable that in such a situation most of the bargaining power is with the investor.
Contrast that with our situation. A typical salary in our profession is US$150,000 per year. A nice laptop costs US$2000. A nice rackmount server, even if you can't be satisfied with a VPS, might cost US$500. (And I used to host my website on dialup in my house, and cable modem connections today are a hundred times faster than colocated data-center bandwidth was 20 years ago.) This is two months of savings, not 250 years. So we have a lot more bargaining power, and that's one reason we're able to demand so much more money than the steelworker.
This is a terrible situation for investors, or for that matter managers of big companies. They are left without bargaining power through ownership of capital goods; they therefore struggle to recapture that bargaining power by lobbying, litigation, and of course illegal wage-fixing conspiracies like the one Google was involved in a few years ago. Aside from its dismal implications for us as individuals, this development will discourage talented young people from going into engineering — law or management will be more lucrative.
Law is zero-sum: a case that one lawyer loses, another wins. Management is largely zero-sum, a popularity-contest game of corporate politics to obtain control over more of the company's short-term fixed pool of resources. Engineering is positive-sum: what one engineer produces, another can buiild off of.
So what does a country look like when its talented young people choose law or management over science, engineering, or medicine? René Favaloro commits suicide; young people idolize Maradona rather than Einstein, and play football rather than experimenting with chemistry sets or building ham radios; its nuclear fusion program is a fraud; it imports its computers from China, then does the last assembly step locally, in order to capture the windfall value of government protectionist measures designed to develop local industry; the talented young people who do go into science or engineering (including programming) usually emigrate, often to a country with better universities. Argentina has been this way for a century or more, and the US is starting to become this way, too.
But it's worth pointing out that, even in the middle of the 20th century, the US wasn't that way, and that's how Silicon Valley was able to exist in the first place.
Also, anyone who wants to do deep-learning research would have to go overseas, unless paying the inflated rates AWS charges was ⓐ feasible in practice (i.e., Argentine banks still allow you to pay Amazon with your credit cards, and ⓑ not so expensive it sinks your research project.
More broadly, what you're suggesting is called "import-substitution industrialization", and it was the mainstream economic policy throughout Latin America during most of the 20th century. By contrast, during that time, most Asian countries focused on "export-oriented industrialization". This is the major reason why countries like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are roughly as rich as the US, while Latin America has become relatively poorer and poorer. I consider import-substitution industrialization a failed experiment, like Communism.
But it did give us Lua!
These professions with less tangible output aren't zero sum. They're the necessary infrastructure of massive organizations, large projects, civilization itself. Calling them zero sum is sort of like saying pipes are zero sum because they just take water from one place and put it in another. It's a bit more complex than that.
Society has to have rules. Society is big, there are lots of domains. There need to be experts that understand those rules and help lay-folk navigate them. That's lawyers. Some are awful, do bad things, make things worse, we produce more of them than necessary, but civilization doesn't really work without them.
Similarly, the economy is huge. Allocation of capital requires people to oversee that process. There's your investors. Many are awful and greedy, but it's a necessary process unless/until we find more efficient ways of allocating capital-- And while programming itself is not capital intensive from the equipment perspective, it is from the "human capital" perspective. The burn rates of many startups will show just how intensive. Again, investors are "plumbing". They're positive sum because the entire system, which is positive sum, requires them to function.
Large projects have lots of moving pieces. At some scales, it's near impossible for a single person to have it all in their head, much less focus on a full time programming job while they're at it. All the moving pieces require coordination. Integration into the non-programming parts of a company require coordination. Managers do this. Plenty are mediocre at it. Others play power games. Some make things worse. But overall the system wouldn't function without them.
According to the OED, the word has been used with that sense since the 16th century; it’s not a recent thing.
A lot of the things you cite were actually fought out in the courts. Motorola sued MOS Technology [1]. AMD and Intel have been in constant legal battles since their inception. The complicated question of Unix ownership started the famous SCO-Linux litigation. This isn't anything new.
And Anthony Levandowski is one of the least sympathetic figures in the industry; virtually no story about people who worked for him has been a positive one. I have sympathy for ordinary senior engineers getting strangled by non-compete agreements. Not for Levandowski.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502#Motorola_l...
I am reminded of Bob Widlar, inventor of the op-amp
The SCO-Linux litigation wasn't complicated. It was just fraud on SCO's part, under copyright law that was well-established at the time. With the Google/Oracle precedent in place, SCO would probably win.
I agree that Levandowski, like weev, is profoundly unsympathetic, but we can't let that blind us to the precedents he is being used to set. If Levandowski wins his case, ordinary (and extraordinary) senior engineers will be safer from getting strangled by non-compete agreements; if he loses, they will be in more danger.
However, thanks to iBCS, it is actually possible to run SCO Unix binaries on Linux, and has been since last millennium. That's why interfaces like signal.h shouldn't be copyrightable: the goal of copyright Law is not to give SCO control over code their customers write.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_In....
If someone else wanted to solve those problems using my work, I would be very glad and would do something else with my time.
What’s different about “today’s environment?” If anything patent rights are weaker today—back in 1976, there were no ex parte or inter partes reexams to challenge patents in the PTO. You had to challenge patent validity in district court, where the patent was accorded a presumption of validity and a high “clear and convincing” standard was necessary to overcome that presumption.
Looking briefly at the case history, it seems like the litigation with Motorola would have played out the same way today. Motorola had patents in the 6800 chip bus. As a result of the litigation, MOStek had to drop the 6501, which was socket compatible with the 6800. But the 6502 was a substantially different architecture internally, and was not socket compatible. (Moreover, that lawsuit settled when Motorola got the upper hand when it discovered that one of the MOStek’s engineers had taken confidential documents with him from Motorola. Taking confidential documents with you, which is what happened here, wasn’t okay back then either.)
On the flight the senior guy mentioned "Gee I wish I had gone in with those guys" And I don't think he was talking about Intel :-)
Just a bit correction there. SCO-Linux litigation is pretty contemporary. Way back before then, there was the System-V vs BSD "Unix wars" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars )
SCO-Linux litigation was just the SCO assholes wanting to get a piece of the pie when they were dying out.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/sco-leaked-e-mail-a-misunderstandi...
The Day SunOS Died
"Bye, bye, SunOS 4.1.3!
ATT System V has replaced BSD.
You can cling to the standards of the industry
But only if you pay the right fee --
Only if you pay the right fee . . ."
For context, the guy who wrote "The Worst Job in the World" email was Michael Tiemann, one of "open source's great explainers." ;) Now he's pranking IBM executives by installing RedHat Enterprise Linux on their mainframes.
And reverse engineering, for example
- IBM PC compatible via Corona Data Systems, Eagle Computer and Handwell Corporation
- VTech clones of the Apple II ROMs for the Laser 128
VTech did their reverse engineering properly and the courts sided with them. You might be thinking of Franklin Computer which directly copied Apple's software and did lose in court.
edit: quoted "ripped off" due to correction from response, it was a legal deal.
And I'm not -that- old :)
This is definitely not how Silicon Valley was built. People moved around (and still do) with the knowledge in their heads, not with proprietary data and backroom deals.
Is this how they rolled back in the old days?
I’m referring to the Cadence vs Avanti trade secret theft in the early 2000s. This was in the EDA (Electronic Design automation, electrical engineering software) industry. See this article for a very brief review of the 6 years of legal wrangling.
https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Cadence_Design_Systems,_Inc._v...
Bloomberg also has a full article, behind a paywall, that is referenced in the wikivisually.com link.
I've been working on open source projects (D programming language) for 20 years now. There's little evidence that making code free of copyright, license, and patent restrictions has impeded progress and innovation at all. In fact, there's a great flowering of programming languages going on.
That is, on the other hand, what this case is about. Levandowski is accused of taking large numbers of confidential and proprietary documents, not just the general knowledge in his head. That’s certainly not how Silicon Valley was built.
And blatant copyright violation is a common tool for up-and-coming countries (e.g. the US in the past) to jumpstart their creative sector. But at some point, they all begin to protect their own work (nowadays the US is among the fiercest proponents of a strong copyright).
I suspect shanzhai will end, too.
You say “jumpstart their creative sector”, but protection from copyright is just as important to allow an existing “creative sector” to survive.
Shanzhai in China will probably end, just like democracy in America. But we can hope that the flowers of human creativity and liberty will not die forever; somewhere else soon, they will sprout anew.
As cheap reproduction is an prerequisite for copyrightable artifacts (don't want to spend too much on creating copies after all), the first high value product in that space is reproduction. Once that infrastructure exists and running it becomes a bottom feeder (everybody can run a printing press), locking in artifacts and thereby recreating scarcity is more lucrative. And that's done through copyright.
Workers (such as the "lots of people in China") rarely enter the picture, it's about who owns the means of production of the highest value goods.
(side note: I'm not a fan of that scheme, but it seems rather inevitable given the incentives)
However something was "built" doesn't mean that those practices are ethical or should be continued, or be imitated by others trying to catch up to that thing.
For (an extreme) example, many countries were built on the massacre of indigenous peoples. Most of them have stopped doing that now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict...
Anthony should have known that files are easily tracked in a place like Google and that he'd put a giant spotlight on himself by competing with Google's future golden goose.
If anything, Musk's undoing will be how he has handled Tesla, such as his nepotist SolarCity acquisition.
I'm not saying Musk hasn't created some impressive companies or that he is bound to fail - but he is not without controversy.
So far the worst thing that has happened to Musk legally is some dropped SEC charges and new controls for one of his companies. The Solarcity deal isn't being investigated by authorities and was approved by 85% of shareholders in 2016, where its connection to his cousins was well known. Otherwise none of what you listed is illegal or in the same ballpark as what Anthony did.
I thought we were talking about questionable characteristics of these people and how it might lead to their downfall. I could easily see Elon Musk get sued for unsafe working conditions from years ago, or a fraudulent claim about Autopilot's capability, or for libel by attacking people unnecessarily on twitter (accusing a diver of being a pedophile is pretty fucking weird).
I remember talking to extremely well-paid lawyers in the industry before the Alphabet vs. Uber case saying there was nothing they could do to Levandowski. Let's circle back in 5 years and see how Musk is doing then.
Jobs and Musk are walking shortcuts. Anthony's biggest mistake is that he got caught by a corporation motivated to pursue.
I use to feel bad for Google and wanted this thief to face justice. But umm he's just doing what he witnessed and was taught(told) to do while working for the big G.
Didn't these ended up where they are by taking all kinds of shortcuts?
It's one thing to own your own brain, it's another take 14K files, including circuit board designs and lidar designs. It's yet another to start using them at new-co that is a direct competitor to old-co. I'm by no means an IP fanatic, but that really does cross over to theft in my mind. But, on balance, the very specific details really matter here, so we'll see...
I am not a Google employee but my understanding is that the biggest fear is not that Anthony Levandowski stole all the stuff but that Uber or another unscrupulous company would race ahead with inadequate self-driving causing a backlash that would bring down a legislative ban hammer on everyone, including Waymo. I think that is the real danger here.
Personally, I don't want Anthony Levandowski in prison. I just want him or people like him to not be able to work on self-driving cars.
I want self-driving cars to arrive and will gladly campaign to ban humans from being able to drive on public road when that day arrives.
What is the line between "short cut" and "working smarter"?
It's not related to this post. Stealing is wrong. It just seems to me the line between being efficient and taking short cuts is really murky.
Bribing a foreign government bureaucrat is a "short cut", but it crosses many lines, that are not ok.
Spamming users after buying their email address, cross fewer such boundaries, cause much less harm, and could be argued as "working smarter".
They usually turn out to have an underlying wonky or absent moral compass, and abusive personality traits.
The outward image is a confidence trick, and that's how they got where they are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5d9BrLN5K4
There's more to say, but I'm not sure it's worth sharing on HN.
> It is not uncommon for tech companies, which fiercely guard their intellectual property, to sue former employees or the firms they join after they leave. But criminal charges of a senior executive for theft is unusual.
If the allegations are true (always important to bear in mind from a one-sided view of the complaint), I can see why they took that step in this particular case. Any "senior executive" should know that's illegal.
The company was less than a decade old, but it had almost seventeen thousand employees, including a thick layer of middle managers. Levandowski recently told me, “One of the reasons they wanted us was because Larry Page knew we were scrappy—we would cut through red tape.” Page, Google’s co-founder and chief executive, often complained that the company had become bloated, and had lost the hacker mentality that had fuelled its initial success. By the time Levandowski arrived, Google’s apparatchiks were in ascent.
“Hiring could take months,” Levandowski told me. “There was a program called WorkforceLogic, and just getting people into the system was super-complicated. And so, one day, I put ads on Craigslist looking for drivers, and basically hired anyone who seemed competent, and then paid them out of my own pocket. It became known as AnthonyforceLogic.” Around this time, Levandowski went to an auto dealership and bought more than a hundred cars. One of his managers from that period told me, “When we got his expense report, it was equal to something like all the travel expenses of every other Google employee in his division combined. The accountants were, like, ‘What the hell?’ But Larry said, ‘Pay it,’ and so we did. Larry wanted people who could ignore obstacles and could show everyone that you could do something that seemed impossible if you looked for work-arounds.”
"winning is good",
"chumps slow themselves down by following rules",
"in your evaluation at the end of the year the bonuses go to 'winners' not losers."
It is a rather narcissistic perhaps even sociopathic view of the world in my opinion, but it does exist.
Find a business that takes forever because of regulation, then ignore the regulation, and profit? Uber, that's an example of this. AirBnB in a lot of instances, too, I think.
Yes, that seems to be the Silicon Valley Culture.
"Move fast and break things"
"Its better to apologize and seek forgiveness, than ask for permission"
"Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter."
Ethics are important, because they change the criteria for decisions from being only dollars matter to "what's the right thing to do." A society full of ethically challenged dollar maximizers is not that good a place to be in.
A much more interesting debate is directly between Uber and Lyft, because most people (even many investors) would argue the main difference was that the founders of Lyft weren't as morally reprehensible as Kalanick.
The sad reality is it seems like poor ethics is rewarded by those who know how to exploit it properly. What most people are really interested in is where is the line? Because let's be honest - most people aren't studying ethics in entrepreneurship because they care about ethics. Most people want to know what they can get away with and still get rich.
You should go back to it, as those are examples of why ethics are needed more than ever.
As someone in the "trenches" and who sees the damage done by them everyday, I'd suggest you can point to the trail of damage they left in their wake and the real lives that have been negatively effected.
In the case of Uber I would simply start with highlighting the number of drivers who now have criminal records as a result of doing nothing more than driving for Uber. How Uber as a matter of policy would fire drivers who were charged criminally for illegally operating rides for hire for Uber. Perhaps most shockingly for these students perhaps informing them of the reality they are far more likely to become an Uber driver than the founder of the next Uber.
Do you have a link? I found nothing of the kind on google.
https://www.newsherald.com/article/20150309/Business/3030999...
However, there are additional facts not included that are pretty egregious, including Uber being aware of the law and local law enforcement's position (I think they previously operated there and stopped), then in anticipation of spring break Uber recruited drivers from outside the county (including monetary payments for drivers to do this), they never disclosed the status of the law to the drivers, and within a day the first driver was arrested.
Some things I've actually seen on those subreddits:
* Give three-star ratings (or worse, one-star) to any passenger who has a wheelchair or a service animal to make sure you're never matched with them again. Straight-up ADA violation.
* When you mark that you've arrived, keep your doors locked until the destination shows up, and if it's a "sketchy" (read: majority black) neighborhood, keep your doors locked, wait five minutes, call them, immediately hang up, report them as a no-show, and collect a $5 no-show fee from them (waiting five minutes and calling is a requirement to collect the no-show fee). Redlining is illegal, and this is straight-up fraud.
* If you get a request to pick someone up at a supermarket, drive just close enough to the supermarket that the "arrive" button becomes pressable, then do the above and collect your no-show fee. Again, straight-up fraud.
* One-star every passenger who doesn't tip. Retaliating against people who don't tip would get you fired from any other service job.
* One-star every passenger who orders a shared ride, no matter what. Again, that kind of retaliation would get a real employee fired. (Yes, shared rides suck for everyone involved, but retaliating against a customer for ordering the most annoying thing on the menu wouldn't be tolerated at a restaurant, yet Uber and Lyft are a-OK with it.)
* One time, a woman complained about how a Lyft driver kicked her out of his car in the middle of the ride because she just nodded along to his stories and didn't engage him in conversation, and he told her "if you don't want to talk, order an Uber instead". The response on the subreddit was universal: he's an independent contractor, so he has every right to kick her out for any reason, and Lyft isn't even allowed to fire him for it because that would count as interference in how an independent contractor does their job. At any other job, flipping out on a customer for not making enough conversation with you would get you in huge trouble, and advertising your employer's biggest competitor would get you fired in a heartbeat.
* This came from the Rideshare Guy blog and not Reddit: since repeatedly cancelling rides after accepting it will get you in trouble, drivers used cancel rides by putting their phones in airplane mode because a loss of connectivity would auto-cancel without penalties. When Uber started detecting that a few years ago (2014-5 maybe?) and counting it against a driver's cancellation rate, drivers started picketing Uber's local hubs over it. In the rest of the service industry, lying to your employer over this would get you in huge hot water, and publicly complaining about it even more so.
Every single one of these was justified by saying "we're independent contractors, we can refuse service to anyone for any reason". Again, a few of these are straight-up illegal, but since only the contractor is liable and not Uber/Lyft, enforcement is exceedingly difficult, and for the ones that aren't illegal, they're still unethical, and any reputable employer would fire an employee engaging in that kind of behavior, but Uber/Lyft drivers get to hide behind "we're contractors and not employees, so Uber/Lyft firing us for how we treat customers would violate our rights".
Unethical behavior is actively harmful to customers.
I guess you never used taxis before Uber was invented! The whole industry has been a huge racket for decades.
>Redlining is illegal, and this is straight-up fraud.
I guess you were never black and trying to get a taxi in NYC to go to the Bronx. There were countless complaints from black people about this practice with the cabs.
Basically, while your complaints are justified, though they definitely seem like cherry-picking the worst horror stories, the situation wasn't actually any better before these services existed. People didn't have any recourse when cab drivers treated them poorly, or made up bogus fares, turned off the taximeter and made up numbers, drove them around in circles to make more money, etc. It didn't matter that the drivers were technically employees; the cab companies had an oligopoly enforced by law, and didn't have to worry about customer service or reputation. And there certainly was no way for customers to inform each other about lousy drivers.
The real problem here is a lack of decent government regulation, and worse, when the (local) government does try to regulate, it just results in cronyism and high prices rather than better service and experience for the taxpayer.
I'll also point out that Uber doesn't have much presence in Japan, because their taxi drivers are actually highly professional and aren't a bunch of lying crooks like the ones in America, so people don't feel the need to flock to it. The fundamental problem is obviously the culture and the people in America, and that's why Uber is successful there.
I'll try my hand at an answer.
First, what is legal and what is ethical are not the same. New York City's pre-Uber taxi industry was racist, exploitative and ripe with fraud. Uber disrupted that cesspool. As recently as 2015, Uber was popular enough among average New Yorkers that it could mobilize grassroots support to rival the mayor [1].
Second, there are degrees of lawbreaking. Jaywalking is lawbreaking. Civil municipal regulation violation, which encompasses most of Uber and Airbnb's early mischievousness, is lawbreaking. Sexual harassment and fraud, on the other hand, are criminally illegal. We have different bands of consequences for different bands of infractions for a reason. Lumping together fraud and jaywalking is facile.
When Uber was busting taxi trusts, they were popular and powerful. When it abused that trust with their god mode and promotion of workplace harassment and overrunning of drivers' rights, their CEO got axed. Society innately and politically recognizes ethics, particularly if the public (e.g. activists, journalists, et cetera) document gross violations.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90237321/the-inside-story-of-how...
Do we still need to strive for ethics in government?
Perhaps your response should have been for accountability for unethical behavior.
...to them, and members of their immediate social class.
Which appears to be where Mr. Levandowski went wrong.
And "move fast and break things" was about code, not about the world at large. It's a coding "philosophy" for getting shit done, that worked very well for Facebook and did not actually harm people.
> What Serge did not yet know was that Goldman had discovered his downloads just a few days earlier, months after he’d made the first of them. They’d called the F.B.I. in haste, just two days before, and then put their agent through what amounted to a crash course on high-frequency trading and computer programming. McSwain later conceded that he didn’t seek out independent expert advice to study the code Serge Aleynikov had taken. (“I relied on statements from Goldman employees.”) He himself had no idea of the value of the stolen code (“Representatives of Goldman told me it was worth a lot of money”) or if any of it was actually all that special (he based his belief that the code contained trade secrets on “representations made by members of Goldman Sachs”).
But he didn't take the engineer/entrepreneur route. He took the corporate espionage route and just stole stuff from one company so that another company would profit, in the process further enriching himself.
At one point he was a good engineer. Then he became just another greedy executive.
Levandowski actually had his own startup Otto which was acquired by Uber.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:I7ifOu...
I'm curious if this explains the delayed timing... New agency team gets started and looks around for the biggest fish to fry. Everyone already dislikes Uber and AI is big right now so it's win-win. Smart move by the prosecutors if so.
(Or it could just be a long process due to the other civil trial happening first or just the FBI criminal investigation taking long, and the new group simply took up the prosecution, I'm just speculating)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal...
The accusation is that Levandowski downloaded numerous proprietary files and plans, which is very far from personal knowledge.
What has he actually accomplished? All I've read is that he built a self-driving motorcycle for the Grand Challenge, but IIRC his motorcycle made it about 25 feet before falling over.
I am envious of Anthony Levandowski
Not his unscrupulous behavior, theft, and all that. But rather the fact that his confidence, swagger, and the ability to talk to Thrun and Larry and Sergei and Travis as equals (or as inferiors, actually, in this technical domain) gave people such a high impression that they bestowed him with $centi-million bonuses.
I'm well-paid in silicon valley but my stock grants have been flat for years. I haven't been able to grow a large team (let alone 2000 people like Levandowski at Uber apparently). If I'm caught in an elevator with our Senior VP, I don't really know what to say (and I'm certainly not invited up to the executive floor to continue the conversation afterwards).
And yet here we have a guy who did all this by orders of magnitude and at multiple companies. I don't want to be a dirtbag like him, but I will admit I am envious.
Unfortunately, time and again I've seen that the person who grows that big team, etc, is an unqualified idiot asshole. Good guys don't frequently win.
It's also entirely within anyone's control to realize that and act accordingly.
I'm less of a nice guy these days, and my life is better for it. Though I try to ultimately be very nice to the people I care about.
Point of order: ‘centi‐’ is one hundredth. Even I've had $centi-million bonuses.
I kind of wonder what's so special about the guy that Google wanted him so bad that they let him basically write his own employment contract, allowed him to have huge conflicts of interest, and then also paid like tens of millions in bonuses per year.
I also wonder what else he wrote into that employment contract of his. You can charge anybody with anything, doesn't mean it'll stick.
Just generally as the act has been described it sounds like the information downloaded was pretty massive and wide ranging.
It seems unlikely he always "played the primary role in developing" all of it. And really you can debate what that quoted phrase means and what the legal ramifications of that are if you were to presume that he could take the things.
And this pisses me off; people in America get thrown in jail for stealing chewing gum.
But I've also seen a few, rare bad apples. There are some people who are borderline sociopathic, who don't think twice about theft, misdirection, misappropriation of credit, and throwing co-workers under the bus for personal gain.
Usually, such people are not caught, and are not punished ... ever. People who learn about such sociopaths, just avoid them.
But sometimes these sociopaths go too far. This seems to be one such case.
This prosecution will discourage the very worst behavior and it will feel therapeutic for people that have felt victimized by various sociopaths who used them as ladders on the climb to fame and wealth ... but the less criminal kinds of sociopathy in the workplace is probably never going to go away. And there's no real way to stop it.
I haven't been to Google or worked with Google in a long time, but for a while there, say between 2010 and 2015, I felt like it was chock full of sociopaths in mid-level management. I don't even think Anthony would have stood out as particularly sociopathic in that environment.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal...
and HN discussion:
Is it really that common?
I feel like most software engineers don't really take intellectual property all that seriously. Most will not think twice about backing up emails when leaving the company which might contain code diffs, design docs, etc.
Friends from different companies usually talk about internal system designs and technical problems pretty freely. One of the circles I hang out with even backup and share the interview question database from every company they've been at.
So while it's probably crossing a line, it's still not something I expect they will ever get sued for, let alone criminally charged. (This is in contrast with friends from the finance industry who are a lot more tightlipped about everything and you do hear stories about regular employees getting sued)
You can't be serious. I would never think of doing this, and I can't imagine who would.
Most employees don't even bother to not pirate software, look at porn or whatever on their work laptops. Its somewhat hilarious.
I know a lot of engineers at a lot of companies who look at porn on their work laptops (which isn't illegal). I don't know a single engineer who would take documents from their previous company to their new company (which is very illegal).
Why would you even do that? I don't get the purpose of that. The email backups are worthless at that point--you can't reference them later, you'd have no reason to refer to them later, and backing up emails for a previous employer isn't your responsibility.
They can't sue him in a civil suit, because, as a Google employee, Google made him sign an arbitration agreement. There's already been an arbitration between him and Google, there was some settlement, and Google is now barred from suing him.
He probably had a sense of ownership on that idea and wanted to see it through to economic viability.
I don't know - thats the only way I can rationalize
- engineer at Company A has expertise in a certain field, and is really, really good at solving problems in this field and knowing what to do next at any point in time. They bring quality to Company A's systems. - engineer moves to Company B to do the same kind of work, and uses their expertise to bring Company B's systems up to high quality as well - Company A says that this engineer must have stolen trade secrets.
Levandowski was charged with stealing specific files and designs, not trade secrets in general.
In other words, the accusation is that he stole technology that was the output of the entire Project Chauffeur team, not simply stuff of his own creation. Presumably, those materials were non-trivial and represent the combined effort of many engineers over many years.
Imagine you're toiling on a team for years and your absurdly compensated boss decides they want the whole pie, clones the repo their laptop, and dips out to found their own start up based on everyone's work.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/press-release/file/1197991...
Even "stuff of his own creation" that he created for Google while an employee there would be Google's intellectual property (assuming the usual terms of employment), and if he took it with him after leaving, it would still be theft.
Google blatantly steals IP from the biggest fish to the little dreamers they inspire and such is well documented. See this popular HN thread... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
Again It's well documented the big G steals IP!!
I told my story for years here then last December lo and behold Ji Qie of MIT tells the same story I've told for awhile but with emails/evidence clearly showing Google getting caught stealing IP. She met with Google ATAP too!
Overall the narrative shouldn't be only about Anthony doing wrong rather he was mimicking what he witnessed and was taught (directly or indirectly) by his employer, Google to do; steal IP!