A dismissed Corning Inc. employee pleaded guilty on 17 January 2006 to stealing trade secrets for manufacturing glass substrates used in flat-panel screens and selling them to a competitor in Taiwan.
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A dismissed Corning Inc. employee pleaded guilty on 17 January 2006 to stealing trade secrets for manufacturing glass substrates used in flat-panel screens and selling them to a competitor in Taiwan. Jonathan Sanders, 37, who worked at a Corning glass plant in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, could be sentenced to five years in prison on 18 April 2006. He pleaded guilty to a felony charge of conspiring to commit trade secret theft, which carries a maximum sentence of nine years in prison. Sanders admitted selling stolen blueprints for Corning“s LCD glass manufacturing process for USD 34,000 to PicVue Electronics Ltd. He met officials of the private Taiwanese company in California and Kentucky in July and December 2000, Assistant US Attorney Tiffany Lee said. The materials, which were returned to Corning after it sued PicVue, were valued at more than USD 100 million, Lee told US District Judge Charles Siragusa. PicVue planned to use the technology to make thin-filter-transistor LCD glass and compete with Corning, she said. The specialty glass accounts for more than one-third of Corning“s annual revenue, which totaled USD 3.8 billion in 2004. With over 50% of the worldwide LCD glass market, Corning is the leader in the sector and its display technologies division posted record sales of USD 489 million in 3Q 2005. Sanders, of Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, said he found the documents at the Harrodsburg plant in 1999 in a hopper containing confidential material for destruction. He took the documents to a job interview with PicVue officials, thinking it might help him get hired, he told the court. Sanders said he did not initially intend to sell the blueprints but changed his mind. He described the sale as “a serious lapse of judgment”. On 20 October 2005, the day after FBI agents arrested Sanders, Corning and PicVue revealed that they had settled a Corning lawsuit resulting from the sale. PicVue agreed not to use the information and to compensate Corning for any past wrongdoing. Court records allege that a PicVue consultant, Yeong Lin, told the company that Sanders was offering drawings he had obtained from Corning, and PicVue authorized payments. Yeong Lin is scheduled to appear before Siragusa in February 2006. PicVue engineers took digital photographs of the Corning blueprints, which described a proprietary glass manufacturing process called “fusion draw”, and put the pictures on a disk that was taken to Taiwan, the records showed. The original blueprints were then destroyed. The theft came to light when PicVue representatives visited a Compagnie de Saint-Gobain SA glass plant in Niagara Falls, New York, in 2001 to purchase a part used in the fusion draw process. Saint-Gobain officials realized that drawings they were shown by the Pic Vue representatives contained the Corning trade secrets. Corning was contacted by Saint-Gobain and notified the FBI, which began investigating in October 2001. Based in western New York, Corning makes LCD glass in Harrodsburg, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.