![]() 3 The incidents that led to the act, while notorious, were exceptional. This was the background against which Congress passed the Economic Espionage Act of 1986, which criminalized stealing intellectual property. American know-how was the target, and by the mid-1990s, tens of billions of dollars’ worth of intellectual property had reportedly been stolen from American companies. Though he was never convicted, German prosecutors tied him to a trove of secret GM documents, and VW settled with GM for $100 million and a commitment to buy $1 billion in auto parts. In the early 1990s, the purchasing chief for GM’s European operations decamped for Volkswagen, allegedly taking with him GM’s cost-cutting secrets. 1 More recently, starting no later than 1980, Hitachi and other Japanese companies repeatedly launched espionage attacks against IBM and other American companies, with the support of the Japanese government. ![]() In 1812, Francis Cabot Lowell traveled to Britain, where he visited and managed to memorize and steal the secret workings of the Cartwright loom. Chinese silkworms legendarily made their way to India in a clandestine transaction. Economic espionage is not itself a new phenomenon. The lawless world of international espionage, until recently the preserve of the most secretive organs of government, has come to affect the everyday commercial affairs of businesses around the world, which are woefully unprepared to deal with it.
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