Wht makes this a criminal matter as opposed to a civil one?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Espionage_Act_of_1996 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defend_Trade_Secrets_Act

Then again, this was also the first period when technology really became ubiquitous. Perhaps it just reflects the spread of tech.

[0] of course treason / violation of oath was a crime, I'm just curious if anyone more versed in history than I can provide more insight.

There's a really quite odd film called Rising Sun with Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes that has corporate espionage as part of the plot. 1993 release, which was actually just after Japan's economy slowed down.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1832

It’s not any more a contract case as stealing a rental car would be. It’s not a contract dispute, it’s a violation of a federal criminal statute.

That is not a legitimate reason to down vote a question.

(I did not really downvote but you get my point)

Perhaps the karma threshold needs to be increased.

A mandatory comment as to why someone -1'ed a post should be mandatory. Unless someone is intentionally being abusive/troll, then perhaps we should engage in the lesser popular viewpoints. Not doing so creates one hell of an echo chamber.

EDIT: currently at -1. You're only proving my point, buddy.

I'm not sure mandatory comments would solve the problem. We'd get plenty of the "I disagree." comments. Could those then be downvoted? Does downvoting those upvote the parent? Could I downvote both. Etc.

I don't know the current threshold but increasing it doesn't create an echo chamber. Look at any thread about gun control in the US and you will a lot downvoted comments on both sides and presumably a lot of highly upvoted comments on both sides as well. Not only that but you can only downvote comments until they reach a certain age. You can upvote them much longer (perhaps forever?). This creates a bias toward increasing votes which itself is a good reason to occasionally adjust the thresholds.

   ... because theft of trade secrets is a crime.

I don't see what good it does NOW to go after these individuals criminally, nor is there mention on who has been pushing this. Jawbone was liquidated in 2017. Who, actually, cares at this point? What do they stand to gain with these charges?

A federal prosecutor gets to beef up their numbers by getting some well paid tech workers to settle out of court for a few years salary spread over a few decades of payments.

(b) Any organization that commits any offense described in subsection (a) shall be fined not more than the greater of $5,000,000 or 3 times the value of the stolen trade secret to the organization, including expenses for research and design and other costs of reproducing the trade secret that the organization has thereby avoided.

But the penalty discussed in the article is up to 10 years in prison $250,000 in fines.

Is there a different statue at play here?

> shall, except as provided in subsection (b), be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.

Stealing money from a bank and giving $100 to the next N people you see doesn't negate the fact that you stole the money from the bank. It just makes it harder for you to give it back.

But to your point: IMO theft is not a good analogy for this. It's not theft, its inflation.

In the bank scenario the bank would still have a copy of the $100. And so would everyone else. It's true, copying money devalues it - just like openly spreading a secret does - so everyone has less than $100 inflation adjusted dollars.

Theft is not a good term for this. I think the crime should be called "Spread of trade secrets"

theft != crime

But, if I had in fact patented a practical implementation of my abstract idea, or my idea itself was about a practical implementation of a thing and it was patented, and you stole it, we’d have loads of fun doing a tango dance at the local courthouse. Assuming of course that I could afford the lawyer to dance on my behalf, considering my terrible dancing skills.

i feel like this may be a category error; it's not clear that "idea" is something which can "be stolen".

at least not in a way that seems similar to (for example) having your car stolen.

I would bet the reason Jawbone went this route is because their lawyers properly informed them that California's right to work laws would have a civil case thrown out in no time. So now we have a bunch of feds involved who need to reach their quarterly quota of prosecutions and these poor employees are going to go broke defending themselves in court.

Everyone at Jawbone can seriously go to hell.

This likely started with Jawbone complaining to the authorities and then co-operating with the investigation. OP’s characterisation of these indictments as “a BS attempt by Jawbone's management to screw over a former competitor” would appear inchoate given the text of the indictments hasn’t yet been released.

That's not to say there aren't people who are essentially random victims of "prosecutorial discretion". Lawyers need something to do all day, and sometimes that thing is finding people to prosecute.

There is of course the third possibility, however unlikely, that the accused engaged in truly reprehensible and brazen theft of their former employer's intellectual property, showing such wanton disregard for civil society that they deserve to be deprived of their freedom and placed in a cage for several months, and then marked as ex-cons the rest of their natural lives. I would say there's a pretty miniscule chance of this being the case, but again, I don't know any of the details.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-goldman-sachs-aleynikov-f...

What does this have to do with anything? Whether or not they are the reason jawbone is finished is irrelevant.

It's hard to know for sure without knowing exactly what Jawbone thinks has been stolen.

Xiaomi has been making fitness trackers that are dramatically better than Fitbit's low-end for years:

  - 1/4-1/3 the price
  - 4x+ battery life
  - waterproof
  - more reliable, at least for me (my Flex required 2 replacements in 6 months)

If Fitbit had to steal secrets to produce such an inferior product, how the heck did Xiaomi do this? Did they kidnap people from Jawbone (or someone else) and enslave them?

I am similarly curious as to any technical reasons why this would have been considered "necessary".

Possibly someone felt a development death march? Of course, it's entirely possible that Fitbit didn't need to, that this was a matter of lack of morals and some odd combination of laziness, stupidity, and hubris.

The corporate version of a guy who shoplifts a $5 widget but has a wad of cash in his pocket. Sometimes criminals are just stupid.

Because it is a Chinese company, and thus, it is "uncool"

I think this is another exemplary case of Chinese company with a superior product being greatly weighted down by its "Chineseness" in Western markets.

More like Xiaomi is a weird word to Western ears and eyes, while FitBit is intuitive to pronounce and its rhyming is pleasant to the ears.

Marketing 101: Pick a name for your product that's easy for your customers.

As for Xiaomi, they are quite frequent on pages of trendy journals there and there with sponsored articles, yet if you ask an average reader if they even noticed it, most will say no.

There are innumerable examples of Japanese companies that changed their names to make them easier to market. Panasonic, for example.

More recently out of Korea, look at the rebranding of Lucky Goldstar as simply "LG." Worked wonders.

There are plenty of Chinese brands that are successful in the West. But they are always brands that are appealing to the Western ear. Vizio. Element. TCL. All better names than "Xiaomi."

Or this comment is an example of blaming bad marketing on racism..

If only there were an example of an industry where innovation thrives as a result of sharing knowledge instead of keeping it secret.

This is legitimately scary to me. If I change jobs how do I know what the line is between applying past experience and copying trade secrets?

I put up with the unreliable, fragile, jawbone up for years. I think I went through about 5 or 6 models personally and got several for my family members.

Why?

Because it had, by far, the best sleep tracker of anyone on the market. I could finally see how much sleep I got and it had a huge impact on me.

Fitbit has finally caught up about a year or so ago. (I was only tracking this as a consumer so not sure exactly).

I would be very interested to know if the alleged theft was related to sleep tracking. Specifically, if it was around figuring out when the user is in REM sleep, deep sleep, light sleep or awake.

Everyone else could not break out REM sleep and deep sleep.

As someone who has worked with the engineers who implemented this on another product, anything except for the most broadly defined categories is exaggerating.

We worked with multiple sleep labs to do controlled sleep studies on people. The way one of those sleep studies worked was a bunch of doctors looked over all the charts of data that had been gathered, and then voted on what type of sleep the subject was getting at different points in time!

Give the same data set to a different set of doctors and you'll get a similar, but somewhat different, result from their analysis.

With that in mind, it is not possible for a consumer grade wrist worn device to give absolute results.

With just an accelerometer, you can get very broad categories, that are easily confused with someone sitting very still while watching the entire LOTR trilogy.

Add in a HR sensor and you can get some slightly better data.

Now not to say these results aren't good enough to be actionable. You'll notice differences in the graphs for making healthy lifestyle changes, heck I was able to see a before/after change on my data by skipping the after dinner gin and tonic, so existing consumer sensors can detect stuff. But anyone claiming whole lot of granularity is over stating their results.

(Unless the state of the art has vastly moved forward in... oh 2 years or so, but given how messy all the sleep studies I saw were, I doubt it!)

I have noticed that my baseline REM (or should I call it “REM”) was different for the two (Fitbit and Jawbone) but if it’s lower than baseline on either device I feel dramatically worse than usual and if I get higher than usual REM I feel better.

As you say, it’s detecting “stuff”

1. Fitbit steal hires Jawbone employees. 2. Jawbone retaliates by charging everyone who left Jawbone to join Fitbit for stealing trade secrets.

I hope this is not the reason why Jawbone is undergoing liquidation and Fitbit IPOed.(I'm sure there are many more reasons, but it'd be shocking these stolen trade secrets were contributing factors).

https://www.wareable.com/fitbit/jawbone-fitbit-legal-dispute...

Last year a judge ruled in Fitbit's favor, stating that "no party has been shown to have misappropriated any trade secret." The fight rumbled on over some patents, but now it's all over, as Fitbit announced in a statement.

Who would take anything from that company? Their software was basically limited to utility apps and companion apps to the hardware. What did these employee's take? The precious InstallShield firmware updater code? I hear they finally fixed the issue with bricking their devices after a few years so that code has to be super valuable..

Be careful, friends.

Stealing your employer's trade secret can trigger federal investigation.

It's shocking how few employees know this.

Once I met employees who would copy over the propriety packages from their old employers to their new employers just to save some time.

The other time i met employees who would develop a system the exact same way as they had done at the previous employer.

This is probably the biggest risk which specialized employees do not recognize while job hopping.

Ugh.. this is called experience, and it is why companies hire senior developers

(Copying code is not acceptable, that I agree with..)

Snark aside, that's what non-compete agreements are for. I don't believe we've reached the stage where employer can lay claim on your experience. If anyone knows any good Sci-Fi exploring this theme, would be thankful for a pointer!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_(film)

P.S. IANAL.

http://fortune.com/2017/02/07/jawbone-says-criminal-grand-ju...

"In the California lawsuit, Jawbone has accused Fitbit of hiring away at least five of its former employees, who it says brought with them hundreds of thousands of confidential files when they joined in 2015."

Looks like it was a smart move for Lewandowski when he took the 5th. These Jawbone/Fitbit employees seem to have chosen the other way:

https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/07/15/jawbone-and-fitbit...

"Fitbit says it never accessed any of the files in dispute, or used them for any of its products. The Fitbit employees in question did turn over 18,000 files to the California Superior Court that belonged to Jawbone."

Waymo did sue Uber and there was a settlement: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2018/02/13/everyone-w...

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1447599/000144759916...

CTRL+F on that page for “On May 27, 2015, Jawbone filed a lawsuit”