[Fricken]

Waymo's case isn't as strong as it looks.

1. Levandowski was critical to the development of the Lidar technology he allegedly stole

2. Google has never before enforced IP theft by former employees, and makes it clear to engineers that it doesn't do that. This is the first time.

3. Levandowski was selling technology he developed at Google to other companies, while working at Google, and Google looked the other way.

Waymo obviously has good reasons to be pissed off, but they've already set a precedent of permissiveness towards Levandowski's antics, which are not news to people familiar with the matter. All these years Goolge has been going around with a 'kick me' sign taped to it's back, and big surprise, Levandowski kicked them. They've already let him get away with this kind of shit.

I can't actually speak to the 14,000 documents he allegedly downloaded, so it's possible there's a silver bullet hidden in there somewhere. We'll see what sort of defense Uber trots out likely sometime over the next few weeks.

[swang]

Maybe I'm missing it here, but your points (mostly 1&2) seem to make Google's case _stronger_. I haven't heard about the point that Google let Levandowski sell tech to other companies.

Also Google did their own internal investigation which led to them strongly believing that the theft of important tech and secrets happened.

> The company decided to perform a forensic investigation of Levandowski’s former company computer after a Waymo employee was inadvertently copied on an email from a lidar supplier with the subject line “Otto Files.” The email was being sent to a list of people that Waymo believes were working with Uber. Attached to the email were drawings of Otto’s lidar circuit board.[0]

Seems pretty straight forward

[0]: http://www.recode.net/2017/2/23/14717432/waymo-otto-uber-ant...

[enraged_camel]

>>Waymo obviously has good reasons to be pissed off, but they've already set a precedent of permissiveness towards Levandowski's antics

Doesn't matter. It is Google's prerogative whether to go after people who steal their IP. Just because they have not done so in the past does not weaken their case. In fact, it strengthens it, because now they can make the argument that the reason they made an exception in Levandowski's case is because of the humongous potential impact of the technology that was stolen.

IP is not like a trademark where if you don't enforce it you lose it.

[brotoss]

Yea I was pretty much blown away by the difference between the Bloomberg feature in last week's Businessweek and the blog post that was submitted here earlier. Paints Levandowski in a MUCH better light with sources and high level interviews.

[Fricken]

Not enough people read that feature, it was the best write-up on the lawsuit to date, from a reporter who has a relationship with Levandowski and other Googlers going back years:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-16/fury-road...

[dantiberian]

Author of https://danielcompton.net/2017/03/14/uber-bombshell here.

I thought the Bloomberg article was pretty favourable towards Uber and Levandowski too, especially some of their reporting on the lawsuit without context:

> Levandowski defended Uber’s lidar technology as “clean”—that is, not the product of stolen design documents—and told the company’s engineers that he’d downloaded the files to work from home.

The major cache of documents that he downloaded were from an SVN system that he apparently had never connected to before (based on search logs). After he downloaded them and copied them onto the memory card, he wiped the laptop.

> A handful of Google employees soon followed him to the new company.

They fail to mention that those Google employees followed him out the door with confidential docs.

In my opinion, the Bloomberg piece is trying to blunt the revelation [1] that Levandowski was consulting/meeting with Uber just weeks after leaving Google and forming Otto by comparing it with his earlier behaviour at Google. They do a good job of that, but didn't ask the hard questions of why he would consult for a direct competitor, especially when he had his own startup where he had the freedom to do whatever he wants.

[1]: http://www.recode.net/2017/3/14/14923056/uber-google-waymo-s...