Remember the three Foxconn employees arrested back in December for leaking the design of the iPad 2 to third-party case makers? They’ve been found guilty, and they’re going to prison.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
It said that Xiao Chengsong, general manager of Shenzhen MacTop Electronics Co., had offered 20,000 yuan, or about $3,000, plus discounts on MacTop products to a former Hon Hai employee named Hou Pengna, for information about the iPad 2. The court said Ms. Hou then paid Lin Kecheng, a Hon Hai research-and-development employee, to get digital images of the device’s back cover from last September, six months before the iPad 2 was publicly announced.
This being China, the penalties are stiff: each individual found guilty will serve sentences up to 18 months and pay between $4,500 and $23,000 in fines.
Given how inhumanely China can treat its prisoners, it’s personally pretty hard for me to get on board people actually going to prison over leaking the shape of the iPad 2 a couple months early, but I suppose Apple and Foxconn have to vigorously protect their intellectual assets. What do you think?
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
25 responses to “iPad 2 Design Thieves Sentenced To Chinese Prison”
Not fair.
Sick world
A thief is a thief. They deserve their sentence. I’m surprised that China is actually sending them to jail when you look at the hundreds of thousands of items that are stolen and manufactured there. These items being knock off purses, clothing, electronics, digital media etc etc etc. Come on China you have a culture of thieving, why just these two?
What the Chinese authorities will do to them will probably be easier than what Steve Jobs would have liked to do to them if he could.
Considering these people were used by Foxxconn as dirt cheap assembly line machines my view is more power to these poor people. The Chinese govt is comprised of ruffians and murderers with no qualms towards controlling it’s population by using any and all brutal means necessary and it’s parasitic businessmen like Gou who capitalize on this type of political landscape. It’s rather amusing to me that the Chinese courts can pass sentence on these poor labor class folk all the while the govt it represents lies cheats steals and murders on a regular basis. The only two qualms I have about this incident is 1 to bad the workers didn’t get away with it and 2 to bad they couldn’t have caused more financial damage to Foxxconn. I also find it interesting that these kangaroo courts can pass judgement on these poor people yet the individuals who paid for the information have yet to be mentioned as being in the wrong.
Congratulations to all the iPad lovers on this thread. You must all be ecstatic that these poor working peoples lives have been turned upside down. The fact that these poor people now have to pay huge monetary fines and are forced to serve sentences in one of the worlds most brutal prison systems because they took pictures of a stupid iToy must bring a smile to your faces. Considering the comments above I doubt any of you even realize your bratty attitudes and pathetic demands of not paying an extra 10, 20, 30 bucks for a over glorified iToy is an instrumental factor in ruining 100’s of thousands if not millions of lives for the sake of having the latest useless gadget for dirt cheap. I doubt any of you even realize it’s your demands to know about the latest Apple product before release date as well as third party manufacturers who rush at break neck speeds to get their crappy 50 cent cases out ahead of time that fuel these leaks in the Foxxconn manufacturing production chain by offering quick much needed money to those who are in need. Self imposed ignorance must truly be bliss.
This isn’t the case of Apple aggressively protecting it’s intellectual property, as in the case of say, private patent litigation or trademark litigation. Theft of trade secrets is a crime in China, as it is in the U.S. and most other countries. In the U.S. you can go to prison for up to 10 years. Like the stolen iPhone 4 incident, Apple would have reported the crime to the police, but the crime isn’t prosecuted by Apple, it’s prosecuted by the state.
Easy. Their crime could have resulted in the loss of a huge business for China. Imagine if Apple had been so pissed about that leak by an employee of the company that makes their products that they ended all production in China and possible with Foxconn. That might be a huge hit for the country in terms of lost jobs etc
No way are they going to risk that.
Plus there’s also other companies getting paranoid that their stuff might be leaked also and pulling out (or just doing it out of sense of solidarity)
Where were the chips in your computer made, the moon?
China has come a long ways in the last 30 years. When you consider they’re outspending all of us in terms of research and development, it stands to reason intellectual rights protection will be of increasing concern. Obviously, radical change doesn’t happen over night.
Japan, Korea and many others went through the same thing. It won’t be long and rampant IP theft will be a thing of the past as China protects its own investments in her future.
This. They are messing up Apple and Foxconn business and this might be one of the reasons both companies are developing existing and building new factories in Brazil.
What’s “fair”? Who gets to define what “fair” is?
Where did you find out it was labor class folk? I didn’t read that in any story anywhere.
I assume it would be management that would have the earliest access to secretive information and things like blueprints for the shapes and sizes of the pieces.
The leak was MONTHS before the iPad was released. I don’t think the labor class folk on the line would know anything till they were actually building them. Also, busy as they are, and with complete lack of privacy, they would have a tough time making precise measurements.
I’ve worked in a secretive manufacturing environment in the past and we know nothing until the last minute.