Ex-Ford Employee Indicted for Industrial Espionage

He wasn't stealing information on how to make a car. It was how NOT to make a car. lol.

chinese at their best.

The damage has been done.

Looks like the Chinese even steal the top style of "research" from North American companies.

We invent something like Industrial Espionage and they go and steal that idea too.

firstwagon, that's one area where the Chinese have definitely surpassed NA.

Maybe, maybe not.

Check out the number of patent lawsuits that any major NA corporation is involved in at any given time. You'd be surprised how many companies have built their fortunes on reverse engineering.

The big difference is the Chinese aren't discreet enough about it and don't have enough lawyers yet to cover it up with paperwork.

Wow smart guy. Steal the information and come back to the U.S. afterward. Hopefully Ford hired smarter guys for the rest of engineering.

FW, reverse engineering is one thing (and often legal). Outright data theft is another.

Reverse engineering is stealing someones ideas, no different then stealing data.

Just harder to prove.

It is different. A number of years ago, I worked for a well known high-tech company. We reverse engineered our competitions products and they reverse engineered ours. Base on that knowledge, we would design to the same end result, but using a different process than the competition (they'd do the same). It was all legal, as long as we could demonstrate zero insider knowledge. What differs with this Ford example is they have significant insider knowledge.

One infamous example was the reverse engineering of the IBM BIOS for early PC clones. IBM fought it and lost.

Moral? Maybe, maybe not. Legal? It can be.

Reverse engineering is certainly not stealing and absolutely ethical in my opinion.

Aftermarket car companies have to so some reverse engineering all the time in order to get their make their products compatible with stock parts. This is especially true with ECUs/chips.

You can have a completely original design all the while using reverse engineering to figure out the requirements for your product. (e.g. the interface, the limits, the format of the end result, etc)

Actually, not just aftermarket companies, but the car companies themselves regularly engage in reverse engineering. I recall an article that showed how GM regularly disassembles competitor's cars and this article detailed their disassemble of the Prius.

See also this article - "Porsche Buying a Tesla Roadster to Study It"
http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/News/articleId=136488

Reverse engineering generally means buying a competitors products and taking it apart so you can copy the ideas and sell them as your own product.

It infringes on patent laws and intellectual property laws. It is illegal and immoral.

It is widely done in companies that don't want to pay for the R&D on doing their own designs.

There is no problem with studying the competitions work but as an engineer your job is to design something better, not to copy.

How can you be the best when all you have to sell is someone elses old ideas?