
The Anthony Levandowski Indictment Helps Big Tech Stifle Innovation - pseudolus
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-the-anthony-levandowski-indictment-helps-big-tech-stifle-innovation-in-silicon-valley
======
Tomte
"much of Silicon Valley’s genesis can be traced to Fairchild Semiconductor,
which was founded by a group of young engineers who came to be known as the
Traitorous Eight after they left their previous employer, en masse, to set up
a rival company."

and

"is that California makes it so easy to betray, cheat, and steal. The state’s
founding commercial laws generally prohibit companies from constraining their
employees with “non-compete clauses.” As a result, for most of the state’s
history, workers could jump from company to company, carrying secrets in their
heads,"

Is the author really so obtuse not to realize there's a difference between
"changing employers and using your knowledge at the new employer" and
"changing employers and bringing a treasure trove of confidential documents
with you"?

~~~
consz
Is there actually a difference? If he had memorized every detail in those
documents, that would have been okay -- but taking the documents isn't? Is the
former only okay because it seems practically unlikely for one human to
memorize everything?

~~~
human20190310
I think there is a difference. You can't really operate a competing company
off of the contents of one person's brain. You need a documented body of
knowledge that the whole company can refer to, with meta-information including
how the research was undertaken.

Having the actual documents makes a huge practical difference. In the absence
of the documents, the employee's new company basically has to re-do the
research under the employee's guidance.

~~~
gingabriska
> can't really operate a competing company off of the contents of one person's
> brain. You need a documented body of knowledge that the whole company can
> refer to, with meta-information including how the research was undertaken

Some will disagree because there exist people who can memorize everything.

~~~
lostmsu
No they can't. And no you still need , because one person can't do all work.

~~~
gingabriska
Aren't there people with photographic memory?

Or you are saying that a person can't create a plan to be followed by people
below him?

~~~
leetcrew
IANAL, but I assume that if someone actually memorized a confidential
document, rewrote it from memory, and showed it to people at another company,
it would be equivalent to just walking out the door with the physical document
in the eyes of the law. judges tend not to be amused by these kinds of logical
gymnastics.

------
mojoe
The article really downplays the extent of Levandowski's greed and willfully
criminal behavior. While Google paid him $120 million he was actively working
on Otto, which he sold to Uber for almost $700 million
([https://www.businessinsider.com/google-
levandowski-120-milli...](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-
levandowski-120-million-incentives-while-working-uber-competing-startup-
otto-2017-4)). This doesn't seem like a case that's going to set some
dangerous new precident.

------
perlgeek
I find the sentiment of the article's title very disingenuous.

The distinction between moving a person's experience from one company to
another, and a trove of documents has already been discussed here.

But the second thing is that's not the indictment that could be stifling
innovation, it's the laws that forbid it.

If you think trade secrets stifle innovation, blame that laws, not the
prosecutor how does his job, or the company that tries to apply existing laws.

------
ben7799
Sounds like a reporter who doesn't really understand how a lot of this stuff
works (didn't study it, never worked in the field?) but think he/she does. It
seems really common.

He's missing the whole thing about the documents. If Levandowski steals the
schematics the new companies circuit boards might look near identical. If he
uses his knowledge at the new company to design new circuit boards they won't
look near identical and be at risk of copyright infringement cause inevitably
he'd change things & improve things cause that's the way people work.

Same thing with code.. if you copy & paste the code from your old employer
into your new one's codebase that will look very different than if you design
& write a new implementation to do something similar.

It doesn't necessarily sound like Levandowski did any of this kind of work
himself though. It sounds more like he walked out the door with a pile of
documents explaining the designs of people who worked for him.

------
CPLX
Yeah no. It’s never been legal to steal massive collections of technical
documents and it still isn’t.

It also remains to be seen how much real actual innovation Levandowski should
be credited with, beyond his clear skill at talking people out of huge sums of
money. It’s far from clear how disincentivizing this type of behavior will
cause any problems.

Like is the premise here that there will be a causal relationship between this
indictment and the progress of technology?

------
basseq
Levandowski is on the extreme end of the spectrum, but there's still going to
be chilling effect.

Lightly paraphrasing Matt Levine in _Money Stuff_ [1] (which I plug any chance
I get), "Google is a big rich company with lots of lawyers to enforce its
legal rights in civil courts: and it did so, and got a significant settlement
out of Uber. It makes me a little nervous to think that big tech companies can
also use the prison system to keep their engineers from competing with them."

[1]
[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-
s-levine)

~~~
htk
I love Matt Levine, but I think he missed the point there, as I don't see
anything wrong with what Google is doing, when taking into consideration
everything Levandowski did.

~~~
perl4ever
What is the reason you think it should be more than a civil matter? It's
certainly not obvious to everyone.

~~~
htk
IANAL but because it involves theft (of information).

~~~
perl4ever
I don't think anyone (particularly Levine who is/was a lawyer and law clerk)
is saying they are in some doubt as to whether there is a criminal law this
falls under.

It just strikes people as wrong and kind of scary for it to be criminal and
not civil. When things are stolen from ordinary people, and the police don't
stumble across the act in progress, they are pretty blase. They don't say "oh,
you have a dispute with someone? Well, we'll arrest them and put them in jail
for a million years". You deal with it through insurance, and/or lawsuits,
don't you? Because as a citizen, the police don't work for _you_.

It feeds into the anti-corporate feelings these days in a visceral way, so one
may ask "how did we get here, and what purpose does it serve?"

------
perfunctory
This may sound too extreme and unpopular but I am against any form of
intellectual property, period. I honestly believe the world without legal
enforcement of IP rights would be a better world.

~~~
dymk
What incentivizes developing new ways of doing things, then?

~~~
iaw
There is a theory that the advantage comes from being the first-mover with a
technology before your competition can adopt it. So innovation doesn't create
a moat but short-term monetary benefits for your business.

There are benefits and drawbacks to both systems but society innovated for
thousands of years before there was IP law to guide us.

------
sharadov
This is grand theft, not some employee sneaking off with what he learned on
the job. To top it, this was done in a calculated manner, weeks after he left,
he started Otto - a truck driving company which was promptly acquired by Uber.

------
MaupitiBlue
Why is Anthony Levandowski looking at prison time and John Carmack laughing it
up with Joe Rogan?

~~~
zaphar
Because, to my knowledge John Carmack didn't walk away with source code,
detailed circuit diagrams, and technical documentation he stole from a company
to start another company. The charge here is quite clear. Mr. Levandowski took
something with him that the law said he wasn't allowed to take and then
profited from it.

