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

Already throwing him under the bus

[H3lldr0p]

And doing their lawyerly best to shield Uber from the worst of the storm that's brewing.

If you go read Ars' article on the same, you'll find that the judge is having none of Uber's bullshit and is forcing them to confront the employee who has their own lawyer and is pleading the fifth about what happened to the documents in question and when.

Uber already has enough trouble on it's plate and apparently didn't do enough due diligence when they bought this guy's company out. I'm going to guess that someone's leadership position is in severe trouble if this trial goes the wrong way for them.

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.

Cute.

[SeaFox]

I bet Uber thinks that since he's a former employee that automatically takes them off the hook for this whole thing.

Re:Wait

[networkBoy]

This is why I have *no* work contamination of my personal machines.
I only bring my phone to work, and I concede they can search the filesystem if they want (it's really no different than a USB drive afterall).

If they expected to search my home machine I'd refuse and lawyer up when they tried to discipline me for it.

On a related note:
Uber is handling this all sorts of wrong.

This happened while I was at Intel, an employee grabbed a stack of confidential and top secret Itanium docs and *while on sabbatical* got a job at AMD. When AMD found out he stole the IP (to help him get a leg up at his new employer) they called Intel, and the FBI; obviously sacking the guy as well.

There is a story (I don't know if true) about a guy getting the formula for Coke and offering to sell it to Pepsi. Pepsi called Coke and asked how they wanted to handle it. The decision was that Pepsi would offer to buy the formula. When the guy came in to sell it, the Pepsi exec accepted the envelope of docs, handed them to a waiting Coke lawyer, and nodded to the waiting FBI agent to arrest the guy.

In both these cases the company potentially receiving the secret sauce for a competitor made great efforts to inform said competitor and distance themselves from *any* question of impropriety. How is it that Uber saw no need for verifying poached employees brought nothing but what was in their heads with them from the competition?