{"id":286,"date":"2010-07-27T12:37:46","date_gmt":"2010-07-27T12:37:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/2010\/07\/27\/publish_and_be_jailed\/"},"modified":"2011-03-02T20:16:20","modified_gmt":"2011-03-02T20:16:20","slug":"publish_and_be_jailed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/2010\/07\/27\/publish_and_be_jailed\/","title":{"rendered":"Publish and be jailed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I read an interesting account of the recent arrest of a research chemist in the USA. <em>Chemical and Engineering News<\/em> <a href=\"http:\/\/pubs.acs.org\/cen\/news\/88\/i30\/8830notw5.html\">reports<\/a> the case of Ke-xue Huang, a former Dow AgroSciences employee, who was arrested by the FBI for &#8220;theft of trade secrets to benefit a foreign government&#8221; and &#8220;foreign transportation of stolen property&#8221;.  The bit that caught my eye was this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nthe case centers on the disclosure of confidential Dow information on spinosyn insecticide biosynthesis in a review article first published online in late 2008 (Appl. Microbiol. Biotechnol. 2009,  82, 13).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>and<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nIn the process of writing the article, Huang is alleged to have passed along confidential information. &#8220;The grand jury found probable cause to believe that Defendant conveyed trade secret information to others in the People&#8217;s Republic of China,&#8221; U.S. attorneys wrote in a legal memorandum. They have requested that the court limit Huang&#8217;s access to the Internet and direct him not to contact certain possible codefendants or witnesses.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Obviously without knowing the details of the case it is difficult to comment much on this, but it seems a bit odd to me that a <b>review<\/b> article would disclose confidential information as it is presumably just reviewing information previously published elsewhere.<br \/>\nThe article mentions that penalties include fines of up to $500,000 per offense and imprisonment for up to 15 years.<br \/>\nPerhaps this is an object lesson in the importance of intellectual property savvy &#8211; knowing what you can say (write) and when and to whom.<br \/>\nMost researchers will not end up in prison for getting it wrong, but failure to get a patent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.genomeweb.com\/blog\/did-you-double-check-sequence\">can be costly<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I read an interesting account of the recent arrest of a research chemist in the USA. Chemical and Engineering News reports the case of Ke-xue Huang, a former Dow AgroSciences employee, who was arrested by the FBI for &#8220;theft of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/2010\/07\/27\/publish_and_be_jailed\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copyright"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}