Ex-Google and Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for trade secret theft. Yahoo Finance’s Melody Hahm shares the details.

Video Transcript

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JULIE HYMAN: Time for Word On the Street where we check in with our panelists, find out what stories they are watching. Melody, there was an ex-Google robo-car engineer who has been sentenced for theft today.

MELODY HAHM: Yeah. I mean, justice is kind of served. Anthony Levandowski, former Uber exec who was the head of its self-driving unit-- prior to that, his startup ended up getting acquired by Google. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison yesterday for stealing an internal tracking doc from Google related specifically to the self-driving car program.

What I found most interesting is the DOJ's press release. "This is the biggest trade secret crime I've ever seen. This was not small. This was massive in scale." That's according to US District Judge William Alsup in his sentencing of Levandowski for one count of trade-secret theft.

When it comes to the actual punishment here, it's 18 months in prison. We do not know when he'll actually serve that time. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, that may get delayed a little bit. But he is, in addition to that, fined $95,000, and he is ordered to pay $757,000 in restitution to Google's self-driving car unit Waymo.

This has been an ongoing battle over the last two years, and it's supposed to be sort of a cautionary tale, right, for a lot of these tech execs who are getting poached, acquired, sort of just traipsing throughout Silicon Valley thinking that they can get away with holding all this intellectual property. But hopefully this will be a sign of, you know what? You should leave your hard drive at your company-- at your former company, and you can start from scratch if you are so brilliant and join an existing team.