Canadian arrested for 'stealing secret' to speedy Tesla battery production Canadian battery exec Klaus Pflugbeil, a 58-year-old who lives in Ningbo, China, was arrested in Long Island yesterday for trying to sell undercover agents "battery assembly trade secrets" so crucial to Tesla's ops that it spent millions on them. According to a court filing unsealed yesterday, Pflugbeil is now up on conspiracy …
Or... he just didn't wander into a place where the FBI has jurisdiction or an extradition treaty. No doubt they know full well where he is, they just don't have any legal means of arresting him. However, if he ever sets foot in the US or probably the bulk of Europe, for example, he'll likely be arrested and shipped off to a cozy prison cell.
Or... he just didn't wander into a place where the FBI has jurisdiction or an extradition treaty.
Please, Shin Beth (with Eichman in 1961) and DCSE (with Carlos aka The Jackal a bit more recently) have shown the way to solve that problem. And the FSB (or was that the GRU?) has shown an alternative method to solve that problem.
Is Trade Secret (I noted the repeated capitalisation in the article) something special and protected in the US? Unless it is, it's not really "Intellectual Property" as such since the only protection is others not knowing about it. I'm not even sure spilling the beans is a crime. More a breach of contract on the part of the person spilling the beans.
It all seems very strange. Didn't Musk once say he'd make all his EV related patents free to use or at least very cheap to license? Did that ever happen?
Interesting read about this. Difference between trade secrets and other IP such as patent protected information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret
Basically it seems that you can be in legal bother of you obtain a trade secret by inappropriate means, such as industrial espionage. However, you are not protected if someone simply comes up with information protected by the secret by themselves. A patent would protect you in this case, but is time limited.
"A patent would protect you in this case, but is time limited."
Maybe a patent would help, but since it's public information, it shows one way to skin that cat which might show somebody else that it can be done and there are other ways to do it. Defending and challenging patents is massively expensive. You need to have an idea that's worth hundreds of millions or you are better off getting that product to market as quickly as possible or finding a buyer that can make use of it and pay you money. A million dollar idea is useless to patent and just money down the drain.
There's a subtlety to patents that people often don't appreciate. It's often not the overall idea that gets a patent, but a very narrow and specific part of it that does. I've been through all of that before and learned how to dissect patent claims to get at what is really covered. I made a product that somebody else had received a patent for but the prior art for it was in an old text book so the patent should have never been issued and I never got any nasty lawyer letters. I'm guessing the other company realized that the patent was tens of thousands of money sunk into a deep well.
Yes, as in most cases, it's the person providing the information who is liable. Though, of course, conspiracy can also be charged. However, you tend to want to keep stuff secret that isn't so easy to patent. We might never know but I'd be sceptical about a process that is supposedly so fantastic but that hasn't been patented.
"Is Trade Secret (I noted the repeated capitalisation in the article) something special and protected in the US? Unless it is, it's not really "Intellectual Property" as such since the only protection is others not knowing about it. I'm not even sure spilling the beans is a crime."
If the person violated an employment contract or received the information knowingly from somebody who did, it's at least a civil crime. I couldn't say if it would be a criminal act.
What is criminal is that this "speedy production" information isn't something that Tesla has been able to make work. The 46800 cells for the truck are a hot mess with loads of scrap. Sure, make them fast, but if they're only suited to be used to practice recycling processes, it's not that useful.
There could be laws against divulging trade secrets to intentionally damage a company. That can get into the realm of people losing jobs and investments losing value. Although, with Tesla, loss of company value due to trade secrets being divulged would be very hard to distinguish from Elon's antics damaging the company's reputation.
China has a long history of getting things made & supported there, then once they know as much as you do about making the thing, they start doing that and you are no longer needed.
As these two came from the China end of the operation, what they know is no longer secret, as all that need to know in China will already know.
5 years ago Telsa opened a plant in China. Musk became the first ever US openly drug abusing CEO to be offered Chinese citizenship - now that's DEI. While he turned that down, he did take up the offer to become Xi's lackey pushing for the absorption of Taiwan. In exchange, he got up to, but not exceeding, 5 years of viable business in China, before Telsa becomes a South American / Mexican parts assembler for Chinese manufacturers exporting to the US.
Tesla’s primary China rival BYD continues to see solid vehicle sales growth, and is poised to potentially become the market share leader in Q4 [2023]. In an analysis last month “Tesla Sells 33% of Vehicles Below Average Cost, BYD Pulls Ahead,” our firm had reported that BYD more than doubled Tesla’s China sales in October and that BYD “is set to overtake Tesla in terms of quarterly BEV deliveries.”
"Musk became the first ever US openly drug abusing CEO"
Really, really .. pales in comparison to what the Biden crime family gouged out of Ukraine.
They'd probably be safer if they'd simply cast aspersions, for example, talking about an apartheid-era emerald mine, which makes the subject sound like an abuser of South African Black people, even if the mine was in Zambia (a country that supported anti-apartheid activities) and their father was an elected member of an anti-apartheid party in South Africa.
Just to pull a random hypothetical out of the air.
Just to pull another hypothetical out of the air, you have a rich white south african, who grew up in the days of apartheid, who frequently rails against DEI and is head of a company that has been sued many times for racial discrimination. The hypothetical company this hypothetical person is head of just settled one such case that they'd lost twice already.
Given Biden is a public figure, the bar for defamation is much higher. In the US at least. Over on the other side of the Atlantic, where there's no legally guaranteed free speech, defamation laws tend to have a much lower bar to clear. You think if just saying something like "Biden crime family" was enough to be sued for defamation that Fox News wouldn't have been sued out of existence by now? After all the things they said about Clinton, Obama, and Biden.
That very Committee was challenged to put the impeachment to the vote this week.
Comer ducked the issue. If there really was a 'Biden Crime Family' and they had enough to make it stick then don't you think that Comer Pyle wouldn't jump at the chance of helping Trump out?
If Joe lending his son $5K for a car purchase and was paid back AND when he was not in office constitutes a 'Crime Family' then it might be that you need some help.
I'm not a US Citizen but it is clear that the Free World wants Joe to win in November. Trump could be in jail by then.
I guess by "openly drug abusing" you mean "smokes weed"?
In many parts of the US marijuana has been legalized. Legally its only very slightly gray because the Federal government is a bit slow updating its legislation. Obviously other countries -- and states -- have different rules (don't get busted with it in Russia, for example) but the days of regarding smoking marijuana as a 'crime of moral turpitude' are well behind us.
But don't let reality get in the way of opinions......
While you can get prescription ketamine for depression, the doses are so small they just wouldn't explain a lot of the behavior exhibited. There's usually a wide gulf between therapeutic and recreational doses. He's either abusing it, or some other illicit substance, recreationally, or there's some other kind of chemical imbalance in his brain.
Tesla is not directly named in the complaint – the docs identify the company as Victim Company-1, a "US-based leading manufacturer of battery-powered electric vehicles and battery energy systems" — but giveaway details in the complaint [allows us to de-anonymise them]
Always good to see side channels leaking data...
More than likely both villians signed NDA and Non-Compete agreements as part of their employment. That will nail them, even if, just to take the extreme case for the sake of argument, they were reselling marketing hype keywords. There are some cases where Non-Compete agreements are used unfairly, but this doesn't seem like one those cases.
Potentially both were employed when Hibar patented their “ Method for filling electrolyte into battery cell and apparatus for carrying out the method” patent.
The court filing is quite interesting and readable (!)
They formed a company in China that manufactures potentially patent infringing equipment, but this is being used as supporting evidence to the theft of Trade Secrets.
What is interesting and if fully backed by evidence highly incriminating, is the email quoted and discussed on page 6 of the court filing (PDF linked in article at “feds allege”)
“I wanted to mention that I do have a lot of original documents, but of course only from before 2009”
Obviously, the issue of NDAs is covered - see paragraph 8 starting on page 4.
Took me less than 6 hours for my own giggles to use Blender and Coreldraw to design a LiFePO4 car/truck battery assembly system using food industry processing techniques that i am well familiar with to create a 1000 by 1000 array of gel OR SOLID electrolyte filler and the casing plus anode/cathode assembler substations to make a full one million batteries in less than 10 minutes.
It means i could make 144 Million batteries suitable for cars and trucks in single day! That's 52 BILLION in a year from one small suburban warehouse-sized factory!
I will open source the design later next week once i write a proper PDF design file showing how to make the assembly system. That was easy to do!
What took everyone so long?
V
I was wonder what exactly the Trade Secrets were, as clearly the patent(s) are not sufficient to build a production line.
Suspect they are sorts of things that someone experienced in the building of continuous manufacturing systems would be familiar with, but have to be derived (trial and error?) for a specific process.
For example from the patents they talk about precision but don’t actually give exact numbers that a production engineer would dial in when setting up a new production line. I can see those details being regarded as Trade Secret..
Trade secrets are not patentable ...cuz... Tbey are supposed to be secret. Ergo, the only laws broken are illegal computer access laws and civil contract law dealing with internal corporate information. Both of the are actionable by the courts!
After my little exercise, i realized how much Food Industry Processing techniques can be easily applied to to Battery Manufacturing.
Again, i will open source my designs so we can finally get Billions of high energy density solid state or gell electrolyte batteries out to all-EV cars and trucks on an inexpensive basis.
V
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