Offenders sentenced up to 10 years for spying on TSMC (opens in new tab)

The article doesn't really explain well how this is spying.

So companies A & B (A=TSMC, B=Tokyo Electron) are in a customer-supplier relationship. Employee B1 of B asks Employees A1 & A2 of A ask for information about how B's technology is working in practice at A, which involves revealing information about A's processes. A1 & A2 supply the information, and B2 at B uses it to improve how B does things, so they can help A more and increase their business with A. There is no allegation that the information supplied to B by A employees left B, or was used for anything except to help with the collaboration between B & A. And as far as the article mentions, no evidence A1 or A2 received a bribe or anything like that.

And yet manager A3 at A finds out about this supply and freaks out because they didn't want A1 & A2 sharing that much information with the supplier. So they make a complaint - and A1, A2, B1, B2 and B as a company all face significant penalties.

This seems unjust given A1, A2, B1 & B2 were all just trying to collaborate in the best interests of their companies, and B employees only used things freely and non-corruptly given to them by A employees; no information was leaked outside of the collaborating companies. A1 & A2 might have broken their company policies, but this probably should have ended at them being educated on the company policies and being asked not to do it again when managing future supplier relationships.

Interesting. It makes sense that Taiwan treats semiconductors as a national security issue. After all that's what the Silicon Shield theory is. But I was curious about what happens in other jurisdictions.

It turns out that you can steal from European companies with impunity because European governments really don't pursue this that much. An ex-ASML engineer (in San Jose) set up two companies XTAL in the US and Dongfang Jingyuan Electron in China and then hired people from his team on ASML, one of whom brought all the source code for one component control with him. XTAL lost the case and shut down, but this chap just went to China and ran Dongfang Jingyuan. Living large. The guy who took ASML secrets to Huawei also got away with it. In both cases, European governments haven't really pursued jail time. The US, of course, got involved and has an arrest warrant for the Dongfang Jingyuan guy that we're never going to collect on. "Uncle Sam has made his decision; now let him enforce it" so to speak.

But since writing this comment, I've now found that they got a Russian engineer for taking some ASML stuff https://www.reuters.com/technology/ex-asml-nxp-employee-sent...

His mistake was taking it to an actually sanctioned country, though. That seems to be prosecutable.

In the US, of course, you will go to jail for it. Besides the national security thing, even Anthony Levandowski was sentenced to 18 months of prison (pardoned by Donald Trump, though), and that was AV tech, not like missiles or anything.

So it seems, based on my Google-level knowledge that:

US: Lots of protected tech, and you'll go to jail.

Taiwan: Semiconductor tech is treated like we do nuclear tech, so you'll go to jail.

Most European jurisdictions: You'll have to pay fines. If you stole to a sanctioned country, straight to prison!

Just a thought: is 1 year of life in prison enough to deter most folks from messing with the law again in the future?

I guess Taiwanese lawmakers deemed this law necessary for national security purposes, but this would not fly elsewhere. We already have something to protect trade secrets: it’s called a patent. If you don’t patent it, and a competitor lures an employee with enough knowledge, everything is fair game, as it should be. Aka if you like it you should put a patent on it.

Edit: why would you downvote this? Jeez…