SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – A federal judge on Monday denied a motion for a mistrial or, alternatively, a new trial, filed by Linwei Ding, a former Google software engineer convicted of stealing proprietary information about Google’s artificial intelligence technology for Chinese companies.
Ding was accused of stealing trade secrets from Google, which hired him in 2019 as a software engineer to help develop its supercomputing data centers. He was loaded with seven counts of theft of trade secrets and seven counts of economic espionage, each corresponding to one of seven categories of trade secrets.
A jury in San Francisco found for Ding guilty from all 14 charges of theft of trade secrets and economic espionage after a two week trial in January.
Ding filed a motion for a new trial and mistrial, along with a motion for acquittal in February, contesting all counts of trade secret and economic espionage.
In Monday’s ruling, US District Judge Vince Chhabria concluded that a rational jury could have found beyond a reasonable doubt that Ding intended to obtain the trade secret information, writing in a nine-page ruling that the government provided “overwhelming evidence” at trial that Ding planned to benefit himself and the company he was setting up in China when he uploaded Google’s Spring 2 trade secrets222.
“The fact that no one ended up receiving a benefit is irrelevant; under the statute, the only thing that matters is what Ding intended when he stole the documents,” he said.
Additionally, Barack Obama’s appointee found that a rational jury could conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Google took reasonable steps to maintain its trade secrets and that the documents on which the jury based its convictions were, in their entirety, nonpublic, and thus afforded trade secret protection.
“(The government) provided expert testimony, based on over a year of review of the trade secrets at issue, to support a conclusion that each alleged trade secret, taken as a whole, was not available in the public domain,” he said.
Chhabria also rejected the defense’s argument that each document in a combined trade secret must contribute to the value of the trade secret, concluding that a combination of documents did not need to be kept in a particular order, presented in their entirety, or contain a “unique combination” of elements to constitute a trade secret.
“Just as adding a redundant note to the secret formula for Coca-Cola would not render the formula vulnerable, adding a useless document to a collection of documents that would otherwise be protected as a trade secret would not necessarily render the collection vulnerable,” he said. “Ultimately, what matters is whether the collection, as a whole, meets the definition of a trade secret.”
The judge also found that China did not need to be complicit in the trade secret theft for it to be considered economic espionage, nor did the jury need to be told that Ding had to know that the documents he stole met the legal definition of trade secrets.
He went on to say that Ding was not deprived of fair notice of the charges against him because the government did not specify which trade secrets it would focus on at trial. The government initially highlighted 105 documents it said contained Google trade secrets related to the company’s supercomputing data centers, but ultimately focused on just 18 of them.
“The reason this trial involved such a large volume of documents is that Ding received such a large volume of documents from Google,” he said.
Chhabria further argued against his rulings during the trial regarding defense experts, as well as the defense’s alternative motion for a new trial on their claim that the guilty verdicts returned by the jury went against the weight of the evidence.
Chhabria said he would issue a separate opinion addressing the issue of Ding’s acquittal on economic espionage charges, but did not indicate when any additional rulings would be issued.
Representatives for neither party immediately responded to a request for comment.
Ding began the file transfer in the spring of 2022, copying information from internal Google documents into the notes app on his company-issued laptop, converting the notes to PDF and uploading them to a personal cloud account. In total, the government said Ding transferred 1,255 documents, consisting of about 14,000 pages, between the spring of 2022 and 2023. Ding also downloaded the documents from his personal cloud account to his personal laptop in December 2023 as the walls began to close in on him at Google.
In two hearings on defense motions after the trial, Chhabria was concerned about whether the December 2023 dismissals were theft of trade secrets, an element required to prove economic espionage.
“I’m not sure it would make sense to look at the statute to charge him with trade secret theft based on the discharge in December 2023 because he had already stolen the trade secrets,” the judge said in May 12 session. “In other words, without authorization, he misappropriated the trade secrets in May of 2023; before then, he has already committed the crime. He has already misappropriated the trade secrets.”
Chhabria also raised concerns about whether the uploads of documents between the spring of 2022 and 2023 and the downloads in December 2023 were two separate crimes or one ongoing crime.
“He committed the crime in April of stealing trade secrets. The crime is over. How is the same crime being dismissed in December 2023?” he asked in June 16 session.
Ding is scheduled to be sentenced on August 4. He faces a maximum of 10 years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine on each trade secret count, in addition to 15 years in prison and a $5 million fine on each count of economic espionage.
Chhabria previously ruled that Ding be released pending sentencing, finding he was not a danger to the public or a flight risk.
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