Below is 📝Dan Ni's 📝cogent summary of 'Did Uber Steal Google's Intellectual Property?' for his
📝TLDR Newsletter. The full article—a twenty minute read—was first published in the New Yorker.
Anthony Levandowski, once a top exec in Google's self driving car program left to start his own autonomous truck company called Ottomotto in January 2016. A month later, the company was acquired by Uber for $600 million. Google needed a way to stop the deal, so they fished around Levandowski's old workplace activities. He had downloaded fourteen thousand files, including hardware schematics, transferred them to an external drive. Waymo (Google's new self-driving division) sued Uber in February of 2018 for stealing trade secrets. However, Levandowski's 14000 files weren't as damning as they seemed, the files were so unimportant Google had considered storing them outside of the company's own servers. Levandowski had been unpopular at Google, and was unpopular at Uber as well, he was fired soon after the case started, and Uber stated to the Jury "Uber regrets ever bringing Anthony Levandowski on board. All Uber has to show for Anthony Levandowski is this lawsuit." Even worse for Google, if they lost the case, the court might unseal the records and cause all the trade secrets to fall into the public domain. They had to settle for about $250 million in stock. What Google did get is now a fear that any employees that leave Waymo might find themselves the target of a lawsuit. Uber is still working on autonomous cars. Levandowski is considering starting another self-driving truck company.
Google is bleeding trust.
References
- Did Uber Steal Google's Intellectual Property?, newyorker.com