Technology theft
Technology theft is the illegal appropriation of secret or proprietary technological information compiled by an individual or other legal entity, e.g. B. Knowledge, documents, samples, models or prototypes, for your own commercial use or sale.
Technology theft occurs in the military and, today, especially in the civilian sector.
Closely related to technology theft are the terms espionage , industrial espionage and product piracy .
Demarcation
The difference between technology theft and z. B. Industrial espionage consists in the fact that technology theft involves the use of foreign technologies, but industrial espionage is not mandatory. The industrial spy can only be interested in the level of development and the technical possibilities of a competing technology. Technology theft is not necessarily associated with espionage either. The mere copying and distribution of a technology protected by another represents technology theft. This is often referred to as product piracy.
Measures against technology theft
activities
When it comes to protection, a distinction must be made between preventive measures such as secrecy and the registration of property rights and reactive measures such as legal prosecution under civil and criminal law. The secrecy can consist in the fact that certain processes are not disclosed, such as the recipe for the production of Coca-Cola or that technical modules are built in such a way that they cannot be disassembled for analysis purposes.
But if information z. If, for example, they become generally known in the form of a marketable product, they can be protected with instruments of industrial property protection such as patents , utility models or designs . The production, sale or use of such protected knowledge by an unauthorized person can be forbidden by a court and a compensation regulation can become effective.
Undermining the measures
Of course, measures against technology theft can only take effect if you can also take legal action against the thief. Means that make measures against technology theft impossible or difficult, are z. B .:
- Technology theft by a rival power : During the Cold War , technology theft was carried out on a large scale by both sides.
- Technology theft through circumvention of property rights : A property right can be circumvented or at least partially circumvented if it is insufficiently broad or if the technology thief has the product manufactured in a country in which no property right exists.
- Technology theft by power when the owner of the property right has no means to defend his or her right.
It is controversial whether the confiscation of German patents and trademarks by the victorious powers at the end of the Second World War can in part be described as technology theft. The seizure of “hostile foreign assets”, which also included accrued license fees, patents and trademarks, was covered by international law as an anticipation of reparation claims. In the Paris Treaties it was later regulated that claims of owners should be satisfied by burden equalization payments.
Famous cases of technology theft
Military technology theft
During the Cold War, technology theft was committed on a large scale in the form of espionage. A famous case was the hijacking of the most modern Soviet fighter, the MiG-21 , by the Mossad on August 16, 1966 .
At the end of the Second World War, the French general engineer Dumanois dismantled Prof. Peters' wind tunnel in the Ötztal without the knowledge of the Americans and English.
Civil technology theft
The German Transrapid consortium accuses China, which wants to build its own magnetic levitation train, of technology theft.
One of the most famous patent disputes over technology theft involved the invention of the commercial laser between inventor Gordon Gould and Bell Laboratories . It was not until the late 1980s that Gould was able to achieve a decisive victory in this patent dispute .
The inventor Felix Wankel reported that French troops had confiscated all of his technical documents and only returned it about eight years later.
The German-Brazilian inventor Andreas Pavel , who invented a device called Stereobelt that was functionally similar to the Walkman and applied for a patent, led a lawsuit with Sony in a London court for years , which he had to give up due to lack of financial resources.
See also
swell
- Marcus von Welser, Alexander González: Brand and product piracy, strategies and approaches to combating it. 2007, Wiley-VCH, ISBN 3-527-50239-4 .
- Christoph Wiard Neemann: Methodology for protecting against product imitations . 2007, Shaker Verlag, ISBN 978-3-8322-6271-6 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hans W. Baade: The treatment of German private wealth in the United States after the First and Second World War. In: Fritz Kränzlin / HEA Müller: The protection of private property abroad (Festschrift for Hermann Janssen on his 60th birthday), Heidelberg (1958), p. 26.
- ↑ Rudolf Lusar: The German weapons and secret weapons of the 2nd World War and their further development. 2nd Edition. JFLehmanns Verlag, Munich 1958.
- ↑ patent DE2813000 .
- ↑ http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13718580.800.html