Interesting. It makes sense that Taiwan treats semiconductors as a national security issue. After all that's what the Silicon Shield theory is. But I was curious about what happens in other jurisdictions.

It turns out that you can steal from European companies with impunity because European governments really don't pursue this that much. An ex-ASML engineer (in San Jose) set up two companies XTAL in the US and Dongfang Jingyuan Electron in China and then hired people from his team on ASML, one of whom brought all the source code for one component control with him. XTAL lost the case and shut down, but this chap just went to China and ran Dongfang Jingyuan. Living large. The guy who took ASML secrets to Huawei also got away with it. In both cases, European governments haven't really pursued jail time. The US, of course, got involved and has an arrest warrant for the Dongfang Jingyuan guy that we're never going to collect on. "Uncle Sam has made his decision; now let him enforce it" so to speak.

But since writing this comment, I've now found that they got a Russian engineer for taking some ASML stuff https://www.reuters.com/technology/ex-asml-nxp-employee-sent...

His mistake was taking it to an actually sanctioned country, though. That seems to be prosecutable.

In the US, of course, you will go to jail for it. Besides the national security thing, even Anthony Levandowski was sentenced to 18 months of prison (pardoned by Donald Trump, though), and that was AV tech, not like missiles or anything.

So it seems, based on my Google-level knowledge that:

US: Lots of protected tech, and you'll go to jail.

Taiwan: Semiconductor tech is treated like we do nuclear tech, so you'll go to jail.

Most European jurisdictions: You'll have to pay fines. If you stole to a sanctioned country, straight to prison!

Offenders sentenced up to 10 years for spying on TSMC