Theft of Trade Secrets. Four Pillars Enterprise Co is a Taiwanese company owned by Pin Yen Yang. Avery Dennison, Inc, a U.S. corporation, is one of Four Pillars's chief competitors in the manufacture of adhesives. In 1989, Victor Lee, an Avery employee,

Question

met Yang and Yang's daughter Hwei Chen. They agreed to pay Lee $25,000 a year to serve as a consultant to Four Pillars. Over the next eight years, Lee supplied the Yangs with confidential Avery reports, including information that Four Pillars used to make a new adhesive that had been developed by Avery. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confronted Lee, and he agreed to cooperate in an operation to catch the Yangs. When Lee next met the Yangs, he showed them documents provided by the FBI. The documents bore "confidential" stamps, and Lee said that they were Avery's confidential property. The FBI arrested the Yangs with the documents in their possession. The Yangs and Four Pillars were charged with, among other crimes, the attempted theft of trade secrets. The defendants argued in part that it was impossible for them to have committed this crime because the documents were not actually trade secrets. Should the court acquit them? Why or why not?

Answer 1

Theft of trade secrets
A jury found the defendants guilty. They appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which affirmed the lower court's judgment. The appellate court held that the government was not required to prove the information the defendants attempted to steal were in fact trade secrets. To prove "attempt to commit a crime," or to prove any other crime, the government must establish (1) the intent to engage in criminal activity, and (2) the commission of one or more overt acts towards the commission of the offense. In this case, "[t]he Yangs believed that the information Lee was providing was trade secrets belonging to Avery. They attempted to steal that information. The fact that they actually did not receive a trade secret is irrelevant. Since the Yangs intended to commit the crime and took a substantial step towards commission of the crime, they violated" the Economic Espionage Act, which makes the theft of trade secrets a federal crime.