> If Levandowski had only taken the secrets that were in his head, he would have been fine.
Kai-Fu Lee wasn't. Evan Brown wasn't (edited to clarify: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/08/12/alcatel_owns_us_emp...). Don't be so quick to fall prey to the Just World Fallacy, assuming that bad precedents will never be applied against good people.
Remember, too, that the founders of Fairchild and of Intel had lots of knowledge in their heads that had been discovered by their left-behind coworkers at Shockley and Fairchild. They probably had documents in their homes — by accident if nothing else, if the history of recovered source code printouts from that epoch is anything to go by — but because there was no prosecution to find out about it, we'll probably never know.
Microsoft sued Google in civil court over a non-compete agreement, not theft. The settlement allowed Lee to keep his job, so other than five months of anxiety I'm not sure how he wasn't "fine". Levandowski is being charged with 33 counts in a criminal indictment. These cases are not even in the same ballpark.
> Evan Brown wasn't.
I don't know who that is, and there are apparently too many notable people named "Evan Brown" for me to figure it out without more context.
That’s still a huge difference. Someone having printed flow control diagrams, knowledge of what did and didn’t work, and the list of packages and tools used in a spreadsheet is very different ripping the entire source code.
Kai-Fu Lee wasn't. Evan Brown wasn't (edited to clarify: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/08/12/alcatel_owns_us_emp...). Don't be so quick to fall prey to the Just World Fallacy, assuming that bad precedents will never be applied against good people.
Remember, too, that the founders of Fairchild and of Intel had lots of knowledge in their heads that had been discovered by their left-behind coworkers at Shockley and Fairchild. They probably had documents in their homes — by accident if nothing else, if the history of recovered source code printouts from that epoch is anything to go by — but because there was no prosecution to find out about it, we'll probably never know.