A former researcher at an Ohio children's hospital has been sentenced to 33 months in prison for conspiring to steal trade secrets and sell them in China. Yu Zhou, 51, was sentenced Monday. Federal authorities say he and his wife Li Chen, 48, who formerly lived in the Columbus suburb of Dublin, further agreed to pay $2.6 million in restitution and forfeit additional assets as a result of their convictions. The pair conducted research in separate laboratories at Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s Research Institute in Columbus, Ohio, each for ten years. Both have admitted to conspiring to steal exosome-related trade secrets and illegally transferring the information to China. Exosomes play a role in the research, identification and treatment of a range of medical conditions, including liver fibrosis, liver cancer and a condition found in premature babies known as necrotizing enterocolitis. Chen received a 30-month prison sentence in February, 2021. Researcher who sold trade secrets to China gets 33 months (msn.com) Associated Press The law under which this Chinese researcher was convicted of was only passed in 2016. This is all part of a move towards what some have called "the criminalization of information". (That is where the transfer of information becomes against the law, setting a somewhat concerning civil liberties precedent) This is also part of a trend of China stealing and obtaining American technology, something that has also very much been a problem to the US. So there is an issue here which many people do not see, an inherent tension between not having totalitarian laws, and addressing a very real economic (and national security) problem. I am just afraid these type of laws and situations, once they become normalized in the consciousness of society, will just be used as a precedent in the future for implementing more laws for the control of information.
It hinges entirely on exactly in which way that "property" is given legal protections. I think we all have to recognize that "intellectual property" has some fundamental differences between normal physical types of property. I am not objecting in this argument to traditional types of intellectual property like patents, where you can't sell something made with the patented design/technology for a certain length of time without permission from the patent-holder. But that involves actually selling something physical in exchange for money, which is something different from direct criminalization of information transfer. The U.S. has a very long history and precedent for patents, something that goes back to even before the founding of the country, and was embedded in the original Constitution. But this legal concept of "trade secrets" is very recent.
This is a tough subject. Many groundbreaking technologies and discoveries that can preserve human life and advance society are made by people seeking to profit off of them, and often that profit is reliant upon controlling that information. This necessarily means that information will not be immediately used to its full potential to preserve life and advance society. But if the information is not controlled, then the discoverers may not profit from it, and will lose their incentive to make further discoveries. So we either stifle research by eliminating much of the incentive to engage in it, or we stifle the good that research can do by allowing it to be controlled for profit. As I understand it, a patent is good for 100 years to allow the inventor and his direct decendents an opportunity to profit from the invention for a time before that invention is available for everyone to benefit from. Perhaps we need similar protections for all intellectual property, though maybe instead of 100 years it could be 20 years or something. There isn't a perfect solution until we can figure out how to eliminate personal greed without eliminating personal drive, and personally I think the two are often very closely linked.
Ok. Perhaps. The idea of national technological advantage falls into this conversation. The idea that transferring protected, copywrite, etc also have specific monetary value to those who register said information must also have protections. I would put forward that when technical work product from private or public institutions falls inside of this paradigm. So, if, for example, I produce a competitive thing, like enzyme isolation or production, or genetic mapping designs and process, those things, I assume are the property of the company or agency I did the work for, unless I developed it on my own, and it would then be mine. Sciencific findings aren't included in this process, as the process is knowledge requiring outside validation which ostensibly is public. So, the US is taking the stance that technological advantage is a national goal. Stealing that property then is both federally illegal as well as illegal within the states that property is produced. I'd suggest that trade secrets began long ago when things like patents were developed to protect the inventors, or developers from others reverse engineering their products.
That is true, but that was not the point that this thread was trying to get at. Enforcing patent protections is very different from enforcing this type of "trade secret" law. This new law is probably also going to result in a total shift in the mentality or legal enforcement. Before, alleged violations of patent protections almost always were against large companies, and involved civil lawsuits, where the punishment typically involves fines or payment of money. But when the transfer of information itself is what is being criminalized, you are going to instead see more individuals being prosecuted, with long prison sentences. People are going to be punished for what the information was (or what the potential of that information is) rather than the commercial profit they made from using that information. That could easily result in less fairness in the legal enforcement process.
What do you think the solution is? We're kinda stuck between the rock of not wanting to punish people for the free flow of information and the hard place of not being able to (meaningfully) punish China when that information flows freely to their rogue manufacturing state. TBC I'm not advocating either way. I value the ability to share information above nearly all. But many bright and valuable entrepreneurs have been ruined, their future discoveries strangled in the crib by having their great ideas stolen by dull unscrupulous charlatans who contribute little to the advancement of humanity.
I don't see it as different as you do. Information that could allow you to beat me to the patent office for work I have done is still stealing from me even if it is just "information". Likewise giving that information to a country that refuses to even recognize my ownership rights in my own research could undermine me perpetually. I think it gets more problematic, however, when it comes to things like contact lists for companies. If my salesman changes to another company, I would probably change to his new company if I like them and they were competitive. I see no real rights in things that generic, but courts have ruled otherwise when it comes to vendor/customer lists.
I believe you're drawing a false equivalency. In that case, it could come down to litigation. You just have to prove that you were the one who developed it first, and if you can prove the other person intentionally stole the idea from you and then used it to submit a patent, they could even be subject to fraud charges, or something like that. Even in the case you are describing, the information would only be criminalized (or there would only be reason to) between the short time it was developed and the time the application for the patent was filed. That is a whole other issue and has two separate aspects: economic fairness, and national security. Let's just focus on the economic fairness. Typically another county that refuses to enforce brand/intellectual property protections will have trade sanctions enforced against it, to prevent those products from being imported and sold in the other country's market. There's a risk in keeping trade secrets and not putting patent protections on it, and that is that someone else might come up with the same idea and get a patent on it. I believe you're conflating a huge number of issues together. In that case they might force the employee to sign a non-disclosure agreement, forcing them to suffer a financial penalty if they share the information with a competitor.
The US went to a First To File patent system in 2013. First to invent is meaningless unless they offered it up for trial/sell or applied for a provisional patent within the first year.
Tell me, wouldn't it make a lot more sense to go back to a patent system where you can contest the patent if you can prove the other person stole your idea, than it does this new type of law that directly criminalizes the taking of the information in the patent before it is filed? There are several other possible ways to address this.
We addressed it by making it easier. I guess Obama and Joe decided it was better to appease China than confront them.
US passed a law to regulate giving technology This has big free speech, First and Second Amendment, as well as general Constitutional implications. In 2018, the US passed a law granting power to the President and State Department to control transfer of missile technology and certain other weapons. The law refers to "transfer of items" but the word "item" is defined as including "technology"... which is just a form of information. It's perfectly normal for the federal level of government to regulate sale of physical things, or transfer of money, but transfer of technology? If the Secretary of State decides to put any foreign country or group on a "terrorist list", then a license is required to share that technology. Note that this is a very different legal bar from just making it illegal to give help to terrorists. A person could still be convicted even if they could prove the group or country they sent information to had nothing to do with terrorism. The law also empowers the President to impose vague punishments on US citizens for violations of this order, no matter what part of the world they are in. This is yet another example of the type of laws that have been getting passed in the US in recent times. Technology is just a form of information, and information has a huge overlap with free speech issues. To pass a law delegating powers to individual government officials to exert legal control over information, that is the first step towards a totalitarian system. This sort of thing is going to be a huge slippery slope, and things like this are just becoming normalized. The law in question is the Export Controls Act (2018 )
