Jury gets espionage case: Greenback pair accused of stealing Goodyear secrets
A jury will resume deliberations today in the trial of two men facing federal industrial espionage charges for allegedly taking photographs of tire-making machinery at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. plant in Kansas in order to duplicate the equipment.
Federal prosecutors and defense lawyers presented closing arguments Wednesday in the case of Clark Alan Roberts and Sean Edward Howley, then U.S. District Judge Thomas W. Phillips sent the case Wednesday afternoon to the jury of eight men and four women for deliberations, which ended the day without a verdict.
Phillips ordered jurors to resume deliberations at 9 a.m. today.
Roberts and Howley are standing trial on a 10-count indictment alleging that they conspired to steal and make use of trade secrets. In closing arguments, prosecutors portrayed the case as one of blatant theft of information from Goodyear to help a competing Chinese tire company gain an economic advantage. Defense attorneys said it was really more of a civil case that didn’t belong in federal criminal court.
“It was a bad business decision to take those photos,” said Tom Dillard, attorney for Roberts. “But that doesn’t make it a federal offense.”
Thomas Dougherty, an attorney for the U.S. Justice Department, disagreed.
“The defense may not like it, but it is a federal crime to steal trade secrets,” Dougherty said. “It is not just a bad business decision; it is a theft.”
Dougherty and Greg Weddle, assistant U.S. attorney, contend that Roberts, who was head engineer for Greenback-based Wyko Tire Technology Inc., and Howley, an engineer in training there, arranged a visit to a Goodyear plant in Topeka May 30-31, 2007, so Howley could use his cellphone camera to take seven photos of an over-ply down machine used for a crucial phase of producing large tires used on mining and earth-moving equipment.
Wyko had a contract with a Chinese tire manufacturer to provide such a machine, and Wyko was having trouble producing one within the 20 weeks stipulated in the contract, prosecutors said.
Defense attorneys do not deny the men took the photographs but challenged the idea that the over-ply down machine met the legal definition of a trade secret. In the 1990s, Goodyear had sent an example of the machine to Wyko, a Goodyear supplier, for possible modification and improvement and Wyko kept the machine for three years, the attorneys said.
“You can’t steal that machine if you already have it,” said Doug Trant, Howley’s attorney.
In 2000, Goodyear sent Roberts detailed photographs of the over-ply down machine, Dillard said. Defense attorneys said neither the machine nor the photos came with any confidentiality agreement, but prosecutors said there was fine-print language in the purchase orders sent with those items that restricted their use.
Earlier in the trial, which began Dec. 1, Trant suggested that Goodyear was using the federal government to do its dirty work.
“If Goodyear needs to sue him, they ought to sue him,” Trant said.
Both sides agreed that Goodyear was warned by a Wyko employee that Roberts and Howling were planning a trip to Topeka to photograph sensitive equipment there. Prosecutors counted this as evidence of the defendants’ plan to steal trade secrets. Defense attorneys questioned why Goodyear didn’t try to stop them after being tipped off.
Roberts and Howley are being tried under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, which Congress enacted out of concerns that foreign countries try to steal U.S. trade secrets, the ease with which technology makes it possible for disgruntled employees to steal a company’s privileged information and other factors.
The act sets out guidelines to define a trade secret, and one of the crucial tasks of the jury will be to see if the over-ply down machine meets them. Something is a trade secret under the act if the owner took reasonable measures to ensure secrecy, the protected information would not be generally known or readily accessible to the public, and if the owner would derive some “independent economic value” from keeping the information secret.
Business writer Ed Marcum may be reached at 865-342-6267.