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Judge's Order Bars Uber Engineer From LiDAR Work, Demands Returns of Stolen Files (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A U.S. federal judge has ordered Uber to bar its top self-driving car engineer from any work on LiDAR, and return stolen files to Google's self-driving car unit Waymo. Today's order by U.S. District Judge William Alsup demands Uber do "whatever it can to ensure that its employees return 14,000-plus pilfered files to their rightful owner." The files must be returned by May 31. The order was granted last week, but just made public in an unsealed document this morning. U.S. District Judge William Alsup found that Uber "likely knew or at least should have known" that the man it hired as its top self-driving car engineer, Anthony Levandowski, took and kept more than 14,000 Waymo files. Those files "likely contain at least some trade secrets," making some "provisional relief" for Waymo appropriate. Levandowski has previously asserted his Fifth Amendment rights with respect to his possession of the files. "If Uber were to threaten Levandowski with termination for noncompliance, that threat would be backed up by only Uber's power as a private employer, and Levandowski would remain free to forfeit his private employment to preserve his Fifth Amendment privilege," Alsup wrote. Several factors limit the amount of relief Waymo might receive. First of all, in the judge's view, not all of the 121 elements that Waymo defines as "trade secrets" are really trade secrets. Additionally, the judge has slapped aside Waymo's patent infringement accusations as "meritless."
I guess they should amend it:
Current: "No tipping of drivers"
New: "No tipping of drivers nor of the company by newly hired executives"
I feel no sympathy for that company.
Why don't these companies just work together for the good of humanity? Make Earth great again!
Return the files?
Did the judge really think this guy walked out pushing a trolley loaded with boxes of paperwork?
Or that he copied all 14,000 to an external HDD, then deleted all the originals and the backups, including all the off-site tapes?
Or is he so disconnected from contemporary reality that he doesn't know that what constitutes a "file" nowadays is not necessarily the same as when he studied law all those years ago?
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Once the cat is out of the bag, they can't really have assurance that the files will be "returned" and copies not kept.
The judge should order Uber to turn all of its LiDAR files (current and future) over to Waymo.
Certainly would make the next company think twice about hiring someone for access to stolen files...
"...would remain free to forfeit his private employment to preserve his Fifth Amendment privilege,"
Is a privilege the same thing as a right in the US?
Legal terminology. What's being returned is a copy of the documents (for Waymo to see what was taken), rescinding all rights to those documents at Uber which means cleaning off all the servers of those files and off of all PCs at Uber and whatever the guy may have touched. And, as an added measure, a complete audit log of everyone who had access to the document, and to ensure that they too have destroyed all copies of the documents (Uber to ensure compliance even if the person does not wish to comply). Waymo to get the copy of all of the stolen documents by end of this month, and the full audit log by June 23.
Technically, by giving Waymo the files back and destroying the copies on Uber's computers, the documents are being "returned" because Uber no longer has them. Also, the term "returned" has a legal meaning that effectively says to deny Uber access to all of those files which may also mean scrubbing backups If Uber decides they would simply recover the documents off their backup tapes or Amazon glacier cloud, that would not count as fully "returning" the documents.
The question Uber should be asking itself right now is, what will Levandowski be taking from them when he leaves...
Google watches absolutely everything its employees do on their work laptops:
"On December 14, he attached a "portable data transfer device" to his work laptop for about eight hours."
everything else in the list could be figured out through server side logs except for how long the portable hard drive was connected. although 8 hours is a bit excessive for 10 GB. I wonder what hardware he was running
I'm keeping their digital copies everywhere, including MEGA, cha cha chaaaa!