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Waymo's Case Against Uber Sent By Judge To US Prosecutors (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The judge presiding over Waymo's trade-secrets theft lawsuit against Uber Technologies Inc. asked federal prosecutors to investigate the claims in the case. U.S. District Judge William Alsup said in Thursday's order he takes no position on whether prosecution is warranted. The specter of a possible prosecution has hung over the case for weeks, ever since the engineer at the center of the dispute, Anthony Levandowski, said he could potentially be the subject of a criminal investigation. Levandowski cited the explosive allegations that he downloaded thousands of proprietary files at the Alphabet Inc. unit before he left. He later joined the ride-hailing giant. Alsup said at a May 3 hearing that Waymo hadn't presented "smoking gun" proof of wrongdoing by Uber even though the evidence strongly suggested that Levandowski downloaded files that Waymo accused him of stealing. The judge's brief order referring case to the U.S. attorney's office made reference to a ruling he issued a few minutes earlier -- sealed from public view -- with a detailed description of evidence.
Unless it's public, "sensitive" information or not, it's a kangaroo court. We allow too much secrecy in the system.
Perhaps we do, but this isn't one of those cases. Private entities are entitled to their privacy. The notion that they should be forced to give up their privacy in order to protect it from being violated is utterly and completely asinine.
But it gets even worse, since the system you're advocating for (i.e. one with public disclosure of all case details) lends itself to trivial forms of abuse. Imagine if any lawsuit at all, regardless of its merit, was sufficient to compel the public disclosure of trade secrets. Never mind that Coca-Cola was in business selling their classic drink long before you were born, if you sued them in court, they'd apparently need to publicly disclose the formula according to you, otherwise it would just be a kangaroo court?
What about more personal civil matters? If your wife were to cite something that's considered grossly indecent as the reason she's filing for divorce, would you honestly suggest she should be compelled to air your dirty laundry in public? I'd wager you'd recognize the value of private proceedings fairly quickly, were something like that to happen.
The reasons we allow private individuals to have privacy don't suddenly disappear when one of them has a grievance against the other. There are situations where public disclosure is indeed the proper course of actions, but that's a matter that's best left up to the courts to decide on a case-by-case basis.