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Waymo: Uber Plotted With Former Exec Before He Left Google (axios.com)
Ina Fried, writing for Axios: Lawyers for Google's former self-driving car unit showed internal Uber emails Wednesday that it says bolster its case that former executive Anthony Levandowski was conspiring to steal trade secrets before he left Waymo. The parties are in court Wednesday trying to convince a federal judge to halt Uber's work on self-driving cars. In arguing for an injunction, Waymo lawyers argued that Uber and Levandowski devised a plan to come up with a company for Uber to later buy. Uber did later purchase Otto, a self-driving truck company where Levandowski was a founder. "Clandestine plan": "Secretly Levandowski and Uber were planning while he was still at waymo and negotiating a deal," Waymo outside attorney Charles Verhoeven said, siting internal Uber e-mails, including some from former Uber executive Brian McClendon, a former Google Maps head who ran some of Uber's advanced technology operations before leaving the company in March. "There was this clandestine plan all along that Uber and Levandowski had a deal."
After hearing that Tim Cook told their CEO off for their shenanigans, and a significant increase of similar news items, one has to wonder if Uber has a serious problem of dishonesty, starting at the CEO level.
Both Uber and Levandowski should spend some serious jail time
Unfortunately, that never happens. I will be extremely surprised if Uber gets anything even remotely close to the punishment it deserves.
Is it your position that companies that are developing something like a self-driving car should do so without any thought of compensation? One of the ideas behind the creation of the concept of "intellectual property" is that when someone spends a significant amount of time to create something, they should profit from the time that they have spent. Perhaps you think the government should just hire all scientists and engineers, and then they will work on whatever the politicians think they should? I'm having trouble understanding how you would picture technology moving forward without some kind of intellectual property concept.
. Both Uber and Levandowski should spend some serious jail time
You can't throw a company in Jail. However, as I have said many times over, we should be able to throw everyone involved at Uber in Jail, including all the CxOs and the entire board of directors.
The fix for corporate malfeasance isn't fining a company, but jailing everyone involved. Oh, and corporate death penalty, by revoking the Corporation's charter. Leave the investors hanging onto worthless stock, and corporate culture will change.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
During lawsuits parties can demand the other turn over relevant documents.
Yes, Uber are claiming that the "privilege log" of the Otto acquisition is itself privileged as it contains lawyer correspondence. If that isn't knocked down by Alsup it will allow pretty much every corporation to decline to produce privilege logs for investigation of malfeasance.
So Uber's lawyers have checked those documents over and determined there is nothing in there, trust them!
That's not what they said. They didn't say there isn't anything incriminating in those documents, they said that they have a right to withhold them because they're protected by attorney-client privilege. The "we're not hiding anything" just means that they believe they have a legal right to withhold the documents, not that there's nothing in them.
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