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Comment by girvo | Hacker News Reader

While I'm not sure I have much sympathy for her, at the end of the day these were her choices (and she makes a pretty terrible criminal at the end of the day), it is interesting to me that she was handed a rather large 14 year sentence, despite not actually giving the illegal trade secrets and data to anyone else.

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If a corporation indirectly kills millions, then no one is accountable, but try to steal from them and you end up in prison.

The key word here is "indirectly". You can get away with killing people too, if you do it by a traffic accident for instance.

What he's talking about isn't something they do by accident.

Every mile of you driving causes a non-zero amount of risk of injury to other road users. The specific crash might be "accidental", but by driving you're making a conscious choice to cause harm to other people.

If you take this argument to its absurd conclusion, one could argue that by merely living, I'm making a conscious choice to harm other people.

… yes. That’s the entire point. That’s basically the plot to the TV show “The Good Place”.

If you subscribe to this idea you may enjoy Schopenhauer's "On the Suffering of the World"

Maybe a better example is to refer to the marginal effects on mortality caused by vehicle pollution, whereby simply by driving the vehicle causes harm to others, without necessitating a direct consequence of the behavior itself (such in the case of a crash). If say, one in every 10,000 trips resulted in a crash, it would be a bit absurd to say each trip I drive results in 1/10000 of a crash, whereas emitted pollutants is discrete and measurable.

Tell me more about the millions dead because of coke. Are you going to apologize for criminals because people have free will? Did coke force people to drink it?

I believe the thread started with a veiled reference to the Sacklers and the lack of jail time related to the manufacture, marketing and covering up the fact that they knew of widespread abuse of OxyCotin (opioids).

It's so funny to watch commentators on HN act like every relationship sports two equal parties that individually are "autonomous rational agents"

Coke is cheaper than bottled water because of the aggressive subsidies they've pursued. The reason that poverty is correlated with obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and dementia (among others) is not politically neutral or ethically innocent. It's a byproduct of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible.

Sure, you're right, the board of coca cola did not put a gun to my head and force me to do a kegger with their sodas. They "only" spent more than the discretionary budgets of some nation states to get kids "craving" (read: addicted to) high fructose corn syrup.

Speaking of guns and forcing people though, are we going to talk about how the company funds paramilitary forces in countries such as Columbia where they kill union activists? I guess those people are foreigners so they don't really enter the calculus. There's nothing more quintessentially American than funding death squads in Latin America I suppose. https://prospect.org/features/coca-cola-killings/

Watching people defend multinationals that would turn them into Soylent Green for 0.01% higher quarter-quarter growth is tragic.

No, we aren't because this is a story about IP theft. Why the comments devolved into apologizing for criminals is beyond me. Nobody is defending multinationals, theft is theft is theft regardless of your politics or personal agenda.

>Coke is cheaper than bottled water because of the aggressive subsidies they've pursued.

Source? Last time I looked into it[1], the claim didn't hold up to scrutiny.

>Speaking of guns and forcing people though, are we going to talk about how the company funds paramilitary forces in countries such as Columbia where they kill union activists? I guess those people are foreigners so they don't really enter the calculus. There's nothing more quintessentially American than funding death squads in Latin America I suppose. https://prospect.org/features/coca-cola-killings/

I skimmed the article and couldn't find anything that supports the claim that "the company funds paramilitary forces". It mentions there's a lawsuit that claims coca-cola was "complicit" (which by the way, ended up being dismissed[2]), and outlines violence against labor organizers by the paramilitaries, but stops short of claiming they were funded by the company.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36841407

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co.

>Are you going to apologize for criminals because people have free will?

Typically victims of crime didn't choose to be harmed out of their own free will. A murder victim didn't consent to be killed. In that case I'm not sure how "free will" applies. People suffering from the negative effects of coke however, did consume it out of their free will.

> People suffering from the negative effects of coke however, did consume it out of their free will.

That is exactly my point. The implication in many comments is that the crime is ok because "coca cola bad" - it's not.

What a ridiculous take. Are you trying to say the ends justify the means? This person stole so they could make a competing company.

How do corporations "indirectly kill millions"? If you're talking about things like "Coke selling sugary drinks that contribute to millions of people dying of health problems", well, it's perfectly legal for you to sell sugary drinks too.

It's a bit more apparent if we use Coke's Christian name, 'Coca-Cola', and take a second to break it down. Coca-Cola implies a cola made from coca. Which is pretty much what it is. Coca farming is kind of a big deal and soft drinks aren't the only thing you can make from the coca plant. And while Coca-Cola does use leaf extract that has had the cocaine removed from it, this is less a "seedless watermelon" situation and more of a "decaffeinated coffee" situation.

So basically, Coca-Cola is kind of orthogonal to Colombian drug cartels.

>And while Coca-Cola does use leaf extract that has had the cocaine removed from it, this is less a "seedless watermelon" situation and more of a "decaffeinated coffee" situation.

>So basically, Coca-Cola is kind of orthogonal to Colombian drug cartels.

This comment is baffling. The first paragraph implies that coca-cola is somehow acting like a drug cartel because their products contain coca extract, but the second paragraph does a 180 and claims that it's "orthogonal" (ie. independent or irrelevant) to drug cartels.

Why would the information that Coca-Cola uses coca plants imply that they are a drug cartel?

They base their business off of the same plant as the drug cartels. They operate independently, and Coca-Cola isn't really going to do anything about the cartels. Or care what they do to coca farmers as long as they also get the part of the plant they care about. And since they don't need the cocaine, it's quite possible that Coca-Cola is made with the by-products of the cocaine extraction process.

Technically, we could have one without the other. Because each needs a part that the other does not. And I'm sure as long as it's cheap enough, Coca-Cola isn't going to question too hard about where its extract is source from.

And to be fair, Coca-Cola isn't above hiring paramilitaries to keep people in line.

Should the sentence reflect the actual damage done (none in this case), or the intention to do damage (which, from the article, appears substantial)

It's quite normal that the actual damage weighs in the sentence. Consider the following: someone speeds across an intersection, without paying attention to the traffic lights and right of way. Or the same, but a car is hit, and the driver of the other car is hurt. Or the driver and two little children die. Would it be reasonable to punish in the first case like in the latter, or vice versa?

Realistically, it reflects the funding of the prosecution.

We often have separate crimes for unsuccessful attempts to commit a crime ("inchoate offenses"), despite no direct harm having been done, which tend to result in less-severe punishments than for successful attempts. E.g. attempted murder is still sentenced pretty harshly, but only around half the length that an actual murder would get.

So I guess that the question is how much time successfully selling the secret would have gotten her.

As always, the US government goes after the small fry who are easy wins to appear to be doing something. The irony is the only real victim here is the Chinese government who made a grant to start a company that was spent on real estate speculation instead.

Govts look at businesses as entities keeping people out of trouble, then there are the dietary elements which also reduce violence, Obese people are less likely to cause trouble, so Coke (and other soft drinks/food manufacturers) will always come out on top.

This is so absurd. Laws exist and were broken. In this case state sponsored IP theft was carried out against a business. There are no small fries involved in any of this. Thousand talents is industrialized espionage.

It seems easy enough for me to understand not to steal from anyone.

But not all laws are correct or exist when one should.

So you are saying intellectual property theft should not be illegal?

That sounds reasonable to me. If you want protection, file for a patent and share the information. Society benefits from information being more widely available, so it doesn't make sense to specifically help protect secrets.

Trade secrets are protected by law: https://www.wipo.int/tradesecrets/en/tradesecrets_faqs.html#...

I guess society disagrees, and honestly this like many comments here seem to have an anti-corporate agenda behind them that is truly irrelevant to the facts at hand.

My comment was specifically in reply to whether it should be illegal. Obviously trade secrets are protected by law. My response is that indeed that law is bad, and society has no reason to protect trade secrets by law, and good reason not to (other than some limited protection through contracts maybe, but that should be a civil matter).

The patent system exists to incentivize sharing information through a limited time monopoly. Giving trade secrets an unlimited time monopoly protection by criminalizing someone sharing them undermines that, and means that patents will only be used for low-value ideas that are obvious/easy to independently reinvent or reverse engineer.

Do you think the level of phosphoric acid is safe? Or is a company relying on the inability of medical experts to state the amount in a can is healthy or not.

Do you think IP should come before human health?

What a ridiculous assertion. Nobody forces you to drink that sweet sweet nectar.

Should we legislate everything that might be unhealthy? There are plenty of nanny states who will do that for you, I don't live in one.

If I want to be sure, I'll grow and make it myself. Relying on someone else to tell you always ends the same way, nanny or not. Science still can't agree on aspertame.

Should we also be lenient on attempted bank robberies and attempted murders?

Depends. Prosecutors are known to trump up charges to encourage a plea, and the "attempted" is an easy one to add.

Both of those include violence, and her situation does not. False equivalence.

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