Waymo v. Uber is a lawsuit scheduled to go to court today (if this is read Monday, otherwise pretend I said February 5th, 2018). Waymo, a division of Alphabet inc (the parent company of Google) is suing the “ride sharing” company Uber for allegedly stealing trade secrets.
Waymo is Alphabet’s self-driving car division, and Uber hired one of their engineers, Anthony Levandowski, “who had taken 14,000 internal files without authorization before leaving Google.” Uber, on the other hand, maintains it didn’t do anything wrong when it hired Anthony and also paid “$680 million for his startup.” In addition, Uber has fired Levandowski since the case began, as he refused to comply with subpoenas (though this could be part of Uber attempting to distance itself from Levandowski).
The burden of proof on Waymo is rather high, as trade secrets aren’t as protected as patents and copyrights and, “Waymo will need to prove that Levandowski stole its information, that Uber knew it, and that Uber incorporated [the information] into its self-driving car technology.” If it is proven that Uber acted inappropriately, the payout could be “billions.”
There aren’t enough facts about the case to make a firm judgement one way or the other, though if I had to go with an admittedly biased gut feeling I would say that Uber is guilty. Uber is one of those companies that seems to constantly skirt the law and venture in to gray (and not so gray) areas of ethically (see: hell and greyball for two quick examples), but sticks around because people like the service it provides. Levandowski has also been known to double dip — he worked at 510 systems and sold products to Google while simultaneously working at Google itself. He later sold 510 systems to Google for “just shy of $20 million” which was just below the line where 510 employees would have received equity payouts.
I also think it will be difficult to prove — maybe too difficult — and Uber and Levandowski stand a good chance at walking away from this scot-free. If that happens, I wouldn’t be surprised if Levandowski released a book titled: “If I Did It: Confessions of an Intellectual Property Thief”.
References:
CS 349: Contemporary Issues 