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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.
From what I've been able to piece together online, it looks like Uber might be in serious trouble. Google apparently really started to suspect something was wrong when one of the LiDAR component providers noticed both companies were sourcing the same parts with Uber apparently using virtually identical circuit board layouts. The timing looks bad as well with the the small startup company being immediately bought up by Uber and sudden development of Self-Driving technology. Plus you're talking about a company who knowingly tested their Self-Driving cars on the street without bothering to purchase a licence to do so. Even if Uber gets off scott free there's this entire question of Patents too which Google probably entirely holds...