Reward for Lifetime Richness

Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department arrested an engineer who provided a South Korean semiconductor firm with data on compact flash memory of Toshiba. It is easy for everyone to understand the case as ordinary competition over highly progressive technologies in the world. Meanwhile, it indicated that Japan was an uncomfortable country for a top engineer to live in. It is no good for national security for Japan, anyway.

According to the reports, former engineer for analyzing troubles of semiconductors, Yoshitaka Sugita, working for SanDisk that had cooperative relation with Toshiba, stole copies of recent research data of flash memory, which had been one of the top selling products of Toshiba, and handed it to SK Hynix, a rival company of Toshiba-SanDisk syndicate.

The police arrested Sugita with suspicion of violation against False Competition Preventing Act, which prohibited wrong acquisition or exhibition of business secrets with penalty of less than ten years in prison and/or compensation of less than ¥10 million. Sugita admitted the suspicion on him. Outflow of the technology caused significant erosion of market share, which was worth ¥100 million. Toshiba sued Sugita and SK Hynix requiring compensation.

Sugita has not been a prominent engineer for the company. Yomiuri Shimbun reported that SanDisk hired him in 2003 and appointed to a development section in a factory in Yokkaichi, Mie. During his career in the factory for five years, he obtained the right to access technological information of the company. When he quitted the job there and employed by SK Hynix in 2008, he supposedly stole the secret information. After he returned home from South Korea three years later, he told his friend that he had earned enough money to live through the rest of his life.

It is a serious concern for Japanese company of outgoing of technology and human resource. One out of eight companies in Japan experienced outflow of business secrets in these five years. Most of those cases were exercised by employees transferred from one to another. Preventive legislation is not sufficient, because suffered company needs to prove that the information has actually been stolen and used by another company.

This is a matter of satisfaction. If the criminal had been satisfied with the treatment of the company, he would have stayed in SanDisk. Frustration makes a cause of betrayal against employers. The same thing can be said to security policy. Even if the government made a law to protect secrets, it is easy for foreign country to steal it through some frustrated figures. The point is how to be a country worth protecting.