In February 2019, a procurement engineer at Yulon Nissan Motor‘s Sanyi plant downloaded FASTBLANK onto his office computer. FASTBLANK is a module of Hexagon’s FormingSuite sheet-metal software, a product priced at US$162,000. He admitted using it to check the cost of parts the company was buying, and said he had only used it a few times.
The company is charged too
At first, prosecutors charged only the engineer. Hexagon, working with ITCA, asked for reconsideration and argued that the company was also responsible. Prosecutors agreed and charged Yulon Nissan under the employer-liability provision of Taiwan’s Copyright Act.
Good intentions are not supervision
Yulon Nissan argued that its employee pledges, training, usage rules and regular security checks should clear it of liability. The Miaoli District Court disagreed. Relying on guidance from Taiwan’s Intellectual Property Office, it held that those measures do not automatically discharge an employer’s duty of supervision. It added that a company with NT$3 billion in paid-in capital should have had stronger technical controls.
The engineer was sentenced to 50 days’ detention, commutable to a fine, and the company was fined NT$300,000. The ruling was reported in Taiwan’s national press, including the Liberty Times.
Why it matters
Only a handful of uses were recorded. The case turned on the engineer’s written admission and on the act of copying itself, not on the volume of use.
“In Taiwan, one employee’s download can make the company criminally liable. Good intentions on paper don’t count as supervision.”
Chris Luijten, founder of ITCA
Sources: Miaoli District Court summary judgment, 2020; Liberty Times, September 25, 2020.
Header photo: Ralff Nestor Nacor, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped and toned).
