Uber said it didn’t use smuggled secrets
Uber told a federal judge Friday that it didn’t use stolen trade secrets for its driverless car project, and therefore the court shouldn’t force the company to stop that work.
Waymo, the driverless car arm of Google, sued Uber in February, accusing it of using trade secrets that had been smuggled away by former Waymo employee Anthony Levandowski. Levandowski is now in charge of developing self-driving cars at Uber.
Waymo had asked U.S. District Judge William Alsup to stop Uber’s driverless car project until the case is settled.
The secrets are related to lidar, a technology that uses laser beams to detect objects and send the images to the self-driving car’s computer for processing. It is a key element in autonomous car development.
The controversy is only one of many in which Uber is embroiled.
In January the company faced customer backlash after a Twitter post it sent after the Trump administration’s travel ban made it seem like the ride-hailing firm was trying to undermine a protest strike by taxi drivers.
In February, former Attorney General Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. was brought in to investigate accusations of systemic gender discrimination and cover-ups at Uber.
Later that month, a viral video of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick showed denigrating an Uber driver who dared question company policies.
Since its founding in 2009, Uber has been embroiled in controversy for its aggressive tactics and pugilistic attitude toward laws and regulations.
In a hearing Thursday, Alsup indicated he’s predisposed to believe Waymo’s allegation pending evidence to the contrary, and summed up the case this way:
“Right now the record available to the court under oath is pretty convincing that Mr. Levandowski downloaded 14,000 documents, wiped his computer clean, transferred those documents to a thumb drive and took that thumb drive with him when he went to start a new company.”
Levandowski has invoked the Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself, his lawyer said.
Last year, he quit Google to start a self-driving truck company, Otto, which was later bought by Uber.
Uber’s defense team suggested Friday that Google and Waymo are turning to the courts to slow a competitor’s progress.
“Waymo’s injunction motion is a misfire,” Angela Padilla, associate general counsel at Uber, said in a prepared statement. “If Waymo genuinely thought that Uber was using its secrets, it would not have waited more than five months to seek an injunction. Waymo doesn’t meet the high bar for an injunction, which would stifle our independent innovation – probably Waymo’s goal in the first place.”
The judge has blasted Uber for insufficient cooperation with his order to search company and employee computers for copies of the documents.
Also Thursday, the judge said he’d allow experts chosen by Waymo to examine Uber’s technology to check for stolen design.