Alphabet's Waymo Asks Judge To Block Uber From Using Self-Driving Car Secrets (theverge.com)

Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving spinoff from Google, is formally asking a judge to block Uber from operating its autonomous vehicles, according to new documents filed in Waymo's lawsuit against Uber. From a report on The Verge: The lawsuit, which was filed last month, alleges that Uber stole key elements of its self-driving car technology from Google. Uber has called the accusations "baseless." Today in federal court, Waymo filed the sworn testimony of Gary Brown, a forensic security engineer with Google since 2013. Citing logs from Google's secure network, Brown claims that Anthony Levandowski, a former Google engineer who now runs Uber's self-driving car program, downloaded 14,000 files from a Google repository that contain design files, schematics, and other confidential information pertaining to its self-driving car project. Levandowski used his personal laptop to download the files, a fact that Brown says made it easy to track.

Comments

Guess what Google doesn't have

[Anonymous Coward]

A patent. Trade secrets can bite you in the ass, and this is why.

Re:Guess what Google doesn't have

[TWX]

Copyrights do protect printed circuit board patterns and the operating code that runs on the computers built on those circuit boards.

It sounds like Uber has implemented PCBs and code that is directly taken from Google. Not even a two-team approach like Compaq did when they reverse-engineered the IBM PC BIOS, but actually taking Google's layouts and fabricating them and running Google's code on them.