Waymo accuses Uber of misappropriating 14,000 files

Google (Waymo) has spent seven years developing an unmanned vehicle control system based on information from lidars. According to Waymo, a competitor Uber managed to go this way in just nine months. And not because there are so talented engineers.

On February 23, 2017, Waymo filed a lawsuit , in which it accuses its former employees of stealing technology and founding a new company, Otto, which Uber acquired in August 2016 for $ 680 million.

Waymo believes that several Otto employees illegally carried important technical information from the Waymo unmanned vehicle project. The affected company calls it “theft” with a calculated damage worth $ 500 million. This amount is derived from the amount for which the startup company Otto was purchased by Uber - this is the cost of the technologies sold and the employees themselves. The first waymo considers its property.
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Among the accusations made by Waymo against Otto and Uber:

• unfair competition;
• patent infringement;
• unlawful appropriation of trade secrets.

Unfair competition undermines technical innovation base, says Waymo. In this case, Otto and Uber "stole Waymo's intellectual property, so they don’t need to invest the risks, time and material costs of independently developing their own technology."

The statement of claim mentions a copy of the email of one of the manufacturers, in the appendix to which the Uber lidar PCB is shown, largely repeating the Waymo PCB design. Allegedly, after that, they suspected the former manager of the company, Anthony Levandowski.

In the statement of claim, it was stated that in December 2015, Lewandowski downloaded more than 14,000 proprietary and confidential design files for various Waymo hardware systems, including lidar printed circuit boards . Then (presumably) he also created a domain name for his future new company and shared with some colleagues plans to “repeat” Waymo technology for sale to competitors.

The statement of claim contains specific information about the devices used and the dates when the information was downloaded from Google servers. To download information, Lewandowski “looked for specialized software and installed it on one of the corporate laptops. Then he downloaded 9.7 GB of exclusively secret files and trade secrets, including drawings, project documentation and documentation for testing. ” Then he connected the external drive to the laptop. Then Lewandowski erased the information and formatted the laptop in an attempt to remove traces for forensic examination.

According to Tyler Ochoa, a law school professor, it is almost impossible for Waymo to release such information if it doesn’t have evidence. In general, cases of the theft of documents are usually accompanied by solid evidence of such theft.

Waymo notes that during the investigation of actions Lewandowski found similar actions from other former employees who now work in Otto and Uber. They downloaded other information on Waymo's proprietary lidars, including a list of component suppliers, production details, and technical specifications with purely technical information.

Stealing this technology is like stealing a secret recipe from Coca-Cola, Waymo says. Lidar own design Waymo can dramatically reduce the cost of electronic filling for unmanned vehicles. Waymo believes that all employee actions were part of a coordinated plan to steal trade secrets and intellectual property.

Thus, the company's employees decided to quickly earn hundreds of millions of dollars - and they succeeded. In January 2016, manager Lewandowski left Waymo. Soon he met with Uber's top managers, and a few days after this meeting, he founded 280 Systems, which later became Otto. In May 2016, he registered the company Otto LLC, which announced plans to develop hardware and software for unmanned vehicles. Three months later, Uber bought this company for $ 680 million. It was already reported that the main reason for the purchase was the lidar technology.

“We took the accusations against the employees of Otto and Uber seriously and we will carefully consider this issue,” said Uber representative Chelsea Kohler in an e-mail commentary.

Case 17-cv-00939 is considered in the District Court of the Northern District of California (San Francisco).

Waymo statement of claim

( original )

This lawsuit increases tension among competitors in the development of unmanned vehicles, including Waymo, Uber, Tesla Motors, General Motors and others. In this area, a real “war for talents” flares up - for the most experienced and qualified employees who can provide a competitive advantage to any of the companies. Meanwhile, Tesla Motors also filed a lawsuit against the former head of its unmanned control system, Stirling Anderson (Sterling Anderson), for violating the NDA agreement when he founded start-up Aurora Innovation LLC with former Google Automotive Engineer Chris Armson. In December last year, Google filed a lawsuit against another of its former employees, who went to work at a startup Drive.ai.