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18 Months In Prison For Making iPad 2 Cases
decora writes "Loretta Chao of the The Wall Street Journal reports on three people in China who were sentenced to between 12 and 18 months in prison for a plot to make iPad 2 protective cases before the tablet's official release. The plan allegedly involved R&D man Lin Kecheng of Hon Hai Precision Industry Company (FoxConn) selling image data to Hou Pengna, who then passed it to Xiao Chengsong, a manager at MacTop. The charges? One 'violated the privacy policy of the company,' two got information through 'illegal means' causing 'huge losses,' and they all 'infringed trade secrets.' The decision was handed down by the Shenzen Baoan People's Court on June 16."
!8 months prison for failure to pay the appropriate bribe.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The US has been a consumerist society for decades and decades. People have been saying it will ruin us all for just as long.
One thing you learn from reading old science fiction is that "modern" problems are anything but modern.
This is not China taking IP seriously as a matter of principle.
This is China taking the needs of Foxconn seriously, and in this case, Foxconn's need is to demonstrate to its clients that it can be trusted with their sensitive commercial materials, such as the specifications of as-yet-unreleased products.
The US has been a consumerist society for decades and decades. People have been saying it will ruin us all for just as long.
Well, it did ruin you.
Hopefully, you see/realize that.
When I lived in the United States, one of our contractors was arrested and sent to prison for industrial espionage (I think the charges were probably mail fraud and the like). He was trying to sell our source code to a competitor, the competitor called the feds, and the feds set up a sting operation while the competitor "played along" as if it were going to pay him for our source code.
They arrested two of our people (both contractors), one was quickly let off though because it turned out he had been duped by his "friend" into lending him a mailbox for a supposedly innocent purpose (the mailbox was to be where the payment would be delivered). I don't remember what was handed down to the guilty person in the end other than it involved some jail time.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
It has ruined you. If you're posting on /. as an educated geek with a good job and a comfortable life then you are one of the few winners of the system. Most of the West is miserable with no voice loud enough to be heard.
The media in every regime give the impression that almost everyone is content with that regime, from the US through the USSR all the way to DPRK. Spend time providing help to or even stopping to have a conversation with the homeless, the chronically sick, the nonviolent prisoner. Then move on to the non-smart - it sounds mean, but half the population are intellectually below average and likely have extremely limited opportunity for it. You'll find that people are struggling and miserable. Not yet at the stage of mass consciousness and disloyalty, but that's yet to come.
I'd summarise our problem in three words: reliance on corporation. We suck at supporting ourselves for our own sake, whether that means individually or at a community / region / national level. Since the '50s local community has deteriorated, and since the '80s we've lost a sense of national community. We're now stuck in this utterly false mindset that the only way to get anything done is to throw money at some magnificent private company to do badly what we've lost the power to do ourselves. Need to talk to someone? Your voice and a knock on the door is no longer good enough. Nor a letter. Nor building your own radio set. Nor even an open access Internet. No, that all requires too much thinking. Now you're tempted to get a shiny ready-made throwaway toy built at a cost which could only be achieved by choosing abused labour in an oppressive country.
In short, we're lazy and we suck. We so far following the progress of every other civilisation (read the original, check out how well he'd predicted the next half-decade through analysis of other civilisations, and identify where the West is now) into destruction.
I can see the headlines now:
"We only leaked the OS Source Code so that people could make better apps" while trying to justify how there's precedent existing for the making of cases.
Apple did not comment, so we don't know who brought the charges, it would seem that Foxconn found out that employees were leaking confidential information, for which they surely signed non-disclosure agreements, for the purpose of lining a friends pockets with money, by being the first company on the market with covers available.
I don't think that this so much affects Apple directly in any way, more so it's a straight forward case of stealing information to give your friends an unfair advantage. Likely Apple had it's own contract with a specific manufacturer to give them the specs of the unit to make cases for them. If they _don't_ prosecute these people then their contractor feels that their exclusive deal with Apple, which they may have bidded for, is not so exclusive anymore.
These guys engaged in industrial espionage, pure and simple.
Why make it out like they are victims?
They didn't get time in prison for making iPad 2 cases, but instead for stealing the secrets necessary to make them before the iPad 2 even came out.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
We're now stuck in this utterly false mindset that the only way to get anything done is to throw money at some magnificent private company to do badly what we've lost the power to do ourselves. Need to talk to someone? Your voice and a knock on the door is no longer good enough. Nor a letter. Nor building your own radio set. Nor even an open access Internet. No, that all requires too much thinking. Now you're tempted to get a shiny ready-made throwaway toy built at a cost which could only be achieved by choosing abused labour in an oppressive country.
Oh please. Even letters were always dependent on some organization to deliver them. Ditto for the "open Internet". And the majority of people never built their own radio set.
People didn't change, technology did.
And that abused labour has seen their wages raise in the double digits per year. If it wasn't for their manufacturing, they'd still live in an oppressive country, but living in even worse conditions.
Dilbert RSS feed
"Almost two months ago three individuals were charged with selling the designs of Apple's latest tablet to Maita Electronics for 200,000 yuan (about $30,857.60 USD). They have now been sentenced in Shenzhen City: 'Xiao Chengsong, the legal agent of Maita Electronics, to 18 months in prison and fined him 150,000 yuan ($23,000) for buying the design from two Foxconn workers ... Foxconn employee Lin Kecheng, was sentenced to 14 months and fined 100,000 yuan, while another worker identified as Hou Pengna was given a two-year sentence suspended for one year and fined 30,000 yuan. All three were convicted of the crime of violating commercial secrets.'"
And only one was sentenced to 18 months ... unless the associated press article I quoted was wrong.
My work here is dung.
Half the population is below the median, Hazel. It is below the average if and only if intelligence is normally distributed. So, while you condescend the lower half of the population, get your statistics right.
I am not surprised and if this happened in the US, there could be similar punishments. Industrial espionage is a criminal offense in the US as well, although I am not sure what the punishment terms are.
Eighteen months for stealing thousands of dollars worth of information so someone can make tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit is not overkill in my book at all. Apple is probably selling the specs for the case to manufacturers of covers. This one decided to steal the information rather than buy it.
What would you have suggested as a sentence?
It's theft of something very valuable. Just like when you decide to steal cash, or someone's car, etc, that's also worth thousands of dollars. Prison is the right thing to do with people who think it's cool to put a bunch of money in their own pocket by violating someone else's privacy and carefully held secrets under the circumstances like those involved in this story.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It's not nitpicking, he was using his claimed personal experience with a corrupt and flawed regime that in turn claimed to be based on an ideology to back up his claim that the ideology at hand represents those things which the regime represented even though it is common knowledge that the ideology does not represent these things.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Yes, it's probably a good thing, but were they the only people who got access to the trade secrets? Once they'd got the dimensions, did they also let Samsung know, for example? If so, then that would have been very useful information to the team designing their next tablet: they would know the dimensions that they had to beat and, since they knew roughly what the specs were already from what chips they were selling Apple, they'd know exactly what hardware their chief competitor was about to ship.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Name one instance where the said ideology has ever been managed to be implemented, without the totalitarianism/fascism.
Looks like a duck, walks like a duck, talks like a duck = has to be a duck.
People are essentially people. You cannot get them to voluntarily give up what they perceive as "theirs", without resorting to force/totalitarianism eventually, which in turn eventually, degrades to an authoritarian/fascist state. It has never worked even once in history.
And this "ideology" was proven again and again to lead to corrupt and flawed regimes.
Because it is just another tool to fool masses and get to the top. It was never supposed to be more than propaganda piece that plays on human greed and envy.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
I wish they would stop with these yellow journalism stupid heading that are just wrong.
No they didn't go to prison because they made a case for the iPad, They went to prison for stealing IP secrets.
Here is a better headline "3 Chinese sentence 18 months for stealing iPad specs before released"
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Every single form of government can (and at some point does) lead to totalitarianism. Ideologies are perfect. Humans are not. So no matter what form of government is implemented it eventually corrodes under the human tide of greed and corruption.
Communism fails in practice (on a large scale) because it goes against human nature. Humans are not nice, altruistic beings. It takes an iron fist to make humans in general conform to any system like communism. This leads to communism having a very short lifespan before the system corrupts.
At the same time, democracy is not a magic shield against this either. A rather stark example is Nazi Germany, which went from a democracy to authoritarian dictatorship in just a handful of years.
All it takes is apathy and/or fear to slide a government into authoritarianism. Concentrate wealth and power at the top and you have a perfect setup for stripping away freedom and rights. Get enough talking heads and charismatic people on your side, and you'll even have the people you're screwing over help you attain your goals.
~X~