Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets
&quot;Theft of trade secrets&quot; is how Silicon Valley was built.<p>Fairchild was &quot;theft of trade secrets&quot; from Shockley; Intel was &quot;theft of trade secrets&quot; from Fairchild.  When Camenzind left Signetics and designed the 555 (under contract to Signetics), he was &quot;using trade secrets&quot; of Signetics; in today&#x27;s legal environment, they could have just ordered him to stick around as an employee and work on a less risky project.  MOSTek was built out of &quot;trade secrets&quot; of Motorola.  Unix was only released under a source licensing agreement, and for decades the Lions book, the bible for Unix kernel engineering, was illegal and could not be printed legally, because it contained &quot;trade secrets&quot; (and copyrighted code!) of AT&amp;T.  (Or, rather, Western Electric.)  Indeed, economists have published a number of papers arguing that that California&#x27;s prohibitions on non-compete agreements and on employer ownership of private work product underpinned the 1970s–1990s shift from Boston to Silicon Valley.<p>So this movement toward resolving such conflicts in the courts, instead of by companies competing to out-innovate one another, is very troubling.  Investors, and in this case Google upper management, are killing the goose that laid the golden egg; they want to shift power from engineers, who make things, to lawyers and investors, who specialize in getting paid for them.<p>This is probably a major factor in the widely-observed shift of the center of innovation from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen, where shanzhai (&quot;theft of trade secrets&quot;) is a way of life.<p>I live in a poor country which is poor mostly because the established economic powers are able to strangle new centers of wealth creation in the cradle, using the government and laws.  Don&#x27;t let that happen in your country.<p>Engineers create wealth.  Lawyers and investors just compete to privatize it.