Uber Finds One Allegedly Stolen Waymo File -- On An Employee's Personal Device (techcrunch.com)

Uber said today that it had found one of the documents Waymo alleges was stolen by a former employee -- who left its self-driving car effort to join Uber's -- on the employee's personal computer. From a report on TechCrunch: The document was found on a personal device belonging to Sameer Kshirsagar, Uber's attorney Arturo Gonzalez said at a court hearing today. It's the first time that Uber has acknowledged that any of Waymo's documents are in the possession of any Uber employees. However, Uber emphasized that the document was not found on Uber's computers. "We did collect documents from him and thus far we have only found one document from his computers that matches the documents identified in the complaint," Gonzalez said. Waymo claims that Kshirsagar downloaded several confidential documents in June 2016, one month before resigning and joining Anthony Levandowski at Uber. The names of the five specific documents are partially redacted in court filings, but one references "laser questions" and another "lens placement."

Comments

Re:Already throwing him under the bus

[phantomfive]

I'm going to guess that someone's leadership position is in severe trouble if this trial goes the wrong way for them.

The trial is going to go the wrong way for them. Google has several patents that Uber copied, they have trade secret laws that are in their favor, and some California competition laws that are in their favor. The evidence is heavily stacked against them at this point: they stole the LIDAR system that Google built and patented. An employee copied the LIDAR designs to a USB key, and that showed up in the logs. Besides that, witnesses heard him talking about his plans while he was still working for Google.

The question is how badly it will go for them. If it turns out that the company knew about the stolen technology, then it's going to hurt a lot. Even if they didn't, Google might be able to completely kill Uber's self-driving car program. Most likely they are going to settle, but right now they are just discovering how bad the settlement terms will be.