An ex-engineer for Google's self-driving vehicle unit has been condemned to year and a half in jail for proprietary innovation robbery in the blink of an eye before he joined Uber.
US District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco said Anthony Levandowski had completed the "greatest proprietary innovation wrongdoing I have ever observed".
Levandowski stacked in excess of 14,000 Google records onto his PC before leaving the firm in January 2016.
He drove Uber's robocar venture, just to be terminated in 2017 over this case.
Levandowski petitioned for financial protection in March this year since he owes $179m (£136m) to Google's parent organization, Alphabet, for his activities.
Judge Alsup said "billions [of dollars] later on were having an effect on everything, and when those sort of money related motivating forces are there acceptable individuals will do horrible things, and that is the thing that occurred here", reports Reuters news organization.
Levandowski - who was an establishing individual from Google's self-driving vehicle venture, Waymo - had been seeking after a sentence of a year's control at his home in the San Francisco rural areas.
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He said he had pneumonia, and could pass on of coronavirus in jail.
However, Judge Alsup said a non-custodial sentence would add up to "a green light to each future splendid designer to take proprietary advantages".
He decided that Levandowski could start his custodial sentence after the Covid-19 pandemic had topped.
Investigators had suggested a 27-month sentence.
Levandowski, who currently runs self-driving truck organization Pronto, said in an announcement: "Today denotes the finish of three-and-a-half long years and the start of another long street ahead."
Uber settled a claim from Alphabet over the proprietary innovations burglary, however the question between the organizations proceeds.
As indicated by TechCrunch, Levandowski is suing Uber for $4.1bn, coming from its securing of his past self-driving truck fire up, Otto
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