A California man admitted 12 June 2007 to conspiring to steal highly valuable flat-panel-glass blueprints from Corning Inc. and hand them over to a Taiwanese competitor.
Yeong Lin, 67, of Fountain Va…
A California man admitted 12 June 2007 to conspiring to steal highly valuable flat-panel-glass blueprints from Corning Inc. and hand them over to a Taiwanese competitor. Yeong Lin, 67, of Fountain Valley, California, could go to prison for up to five years after pleading guilty to a federal charge of theft of trade secrets. Sentencing was set for 14 September 2007. While working as a consultant for Taiwan-based PicVue Electronics Ltd., prosecutors allege Lin put PicVue officials in contact with a Corning employee who offered drawings he had obtained illegally from his employer. Jonathan Sanders, who worked at a Corning glass plant in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, pleaded guilty in 2006 and was given a four-year sentence and a USD 20,000 fine. He admitted stealing the blueprints of Corning“s liquid-crystal-display glassmaking process and selling them to PicVue for USD 34,000 in 2000. The materials, which were returned to Corning after it sued PicVue, were valued at more than USD 100 million, prosecutors said. PicVue, which later declared bankruptcy, had intended to use the technology to make thin-filter-transistor LCD glass and compete with Corning, prosecutors said. Defending Mr. Lin, James Harrington described him as “a small player in this” and noted that no PicVue officials in Taiwan were charged even though at least one of them owns property in the United States. Corning is the world“s largest maker of ultra-thin LCD glass substrates and the bulk of its profits, which reached USD 327 million in the 1Q 2007, come from this product. Mr. Sanders, of Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, said he found the documents at the Harrodsburg plant in 1999 in a hopper containing confidential material for destruction. PicVue engineers took digital photographs of the blueprints, detailing a proprietary glassmaking process called “fusion draw”, and downloaded the pictures to a disk that was taken to Taiwan, court records showed. The original blueprints were then destroyed. Corning learned about the theft in 2001 and notified the FBI, which began an investigation that led to the arrests of Sanders and Lin in 2005.