week 10
- An engineer from Schaumburg faces federal charges of betraying her ex-employer by stealing trade secrets and wanting to take them to China. She was charged with three counts of theft of trade secrets. U.S. customs seized private information from her when she was boarding a flight to China. The release of this private engineering information would have cost the telecommunications firm that employeed her $600 million. She posed a $50,000 bond. Without telling the company she started working for a Chinese company in the same field. She returned to the company and downloaded over 200 docuents from the secure network and the next day attempted to leave to China. She is currently facing a max of 10 years in prision and a $250,000.
This case relates to the many cases we have been discussing in class. In class we have been reading various cases that relate to trade secrets like the case agaist a former coke a cola employee.
- One time employee of Lubrizol Corp. is accused of selling trade secrets to a South Korean competitor. Kim is charged with conspiracy and theft of trade secrets. She was a research and development associate and pocketed at least $170,000 in exchange for trade secrets from 2001 to 2007. Lubrizold porduces and sells pecialty chemicals internationally and found out about Kim's scheme after an investigation. When Lubizol employs their employees they go through a variety of methods to protect their trade secrets including confidentiality agreements. Kim met with executives of SK Chemicals that sells products similar to Lubriold. Kim downloaded sensitive Lubrizold product data onto a computer and went to Arizona, Canada and South Korea at least 17 times. How Kim connected with SK still remains under investigation.
Similar cases like these have been discussed in class because we have been talking about trade secrets. Trade secrets are company secrets that should not be known to the public because that would harm the company.
- Former DuPont scientist, Gary Min, admitted stealing company secrets was sentenced to 18 monts in prison, fined $30,000, and orderd to pay $14,500 in restitution to DuPont. Min asked for leniency because going to jail would cause a hardship to his family. Also because the consequences of his action did not result in a significant loss to DuPont. Min in 2005 started discussing with Victrex about a job in Asia and in October Min accepted the job. Min told DuPont of his plans until December. Between August and December of 2005 Min downloaded about 22,000 abstracts and 16,000 full-text pdf documents. Because of these large amounts of downloads DuPont grew suspicious and triggered a review of Min's online actions. After he began working for Victrex Min uploaded about 180 DuPont documents to his laptop.
In our classes we have been discussing trade secrets and how important they are to a company. Companies take extreme measures to protect their secrets and make sure that they do not get out to the general public.