Protect key technology and brains

The race for military and other essential technologies is fiercer than ever. If the government does not toughen the law, technology leaks will repeat again and again.

A court has issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting a former researcher at SK Hynix from migrating to its competitor Micron Technology. The employee was engaged in designing semiconductors at the major chipmaker. But there are concerns about the possibility of the researcher having handed over SK’s crucial technologies to Micron.

The Seoul Central District Court last month accepted SK Hynix’s request to disallow the worker’s migration to Micron. The interim injunction is effective until July 24. If the employee violates the injunction, he must pay 10 million won ($7,500) in fines each day. While working for SK Hynix, the researcher was involved in developing high-bandwidth memory chips. Before leaving the company, he submitted a written oath to not migrate to rivalling companies for two years. But it turned out that he was working for Micron with a hefty pay on executive levels.

Industry insiders suspect that the chipmaker’s core technologies were already transferred to Micron, as implied by Micron’s declaration last October to dominate fifth-generation chips after skipping over fourth-generation chips. But SK Hynix could not detect any sign of his defection to Micron for a year. The court did shorten the deliberation period, yet it took six months for the court to deliver a provisional verdict.

The chip industry festers with frequent leaks of cutting-edge technology and manpower. The defection of a Samsung Electronics executive to a Chinese chipmaker last year to help it build a new factory in China shocked our society. Chinese companies were bent on attracting talents from Korean rivals in the past, but tech companies in advanced economies are no exceptions these days.

Such industrial defections are not only difficult to prevent, but their punishments are also very mild. Among the 33 cases involving the violation of the Industrial Technology Protection Act in 2021, 60 percent of the accused were found not guilty while 27 percent received a suspended sentence. Even if they were found guilty, their average jail term was shorter than 15 months. Our companies must manage their employees more carefully, and the court must deliver a stricter sentence than before.

The government must also broaden the scope of criminal punishment for espionage activities. The current law cannot apply espionage charges to those who leak national secrets if the counterpart is not North Korea. So even if an employee is caught trying to leak sensitive technology for our KF-21 fighter jets, espionage charges cannot be applied. The race for military and other essential technologies is fiercer than ever. If the government does not toughen the law, technology leaks will repeat again and again.