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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
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.
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.
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.
Would you like your oppression with pickles or with mayonnaise? It's probably a similar corrupt corporatocracy situation in many parts of the world, with actions which should be dealt with in civil court criminalized. In the US, The Economic Espionage Act of 1996 brought us (among other insults) US Code Title 18, Part 1, Section 1832, which criminalizes such acts, stating that anyone who steals, or receives or possesses or uses without authorization, a trade secret, or merely ATTEMPTS same, shall be fined, or imprisoned up to 10 years, or both. The fine is limited to $5 million for an organization, but is WITHOUT ANY STATED LIMIT for an individual.
Section 1831 deals with basically the same offenses "to benefit a foreign power," which means that section 1832, giving the lie to the name of the bill, has nothing to do with true espionage.
This wonderful legislation, like the DMCA, was brought to you by a cooperation between tweedledee Democrats and tweedledum Republicans in Congress and the White House.
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~