[msb-alumni] Uber mulled risk of legal suit with Google months before it bought start-up at heart of legal battle
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2017 14:01:28 -0400
BlankUber may be in real deep doo-doo over this. And, they better not mess
around with that Federal Judge; he was involved in some Internet merger suit
five years ago and taught himself programming to better understand the issues.
Uber mulled risk of legal suit with Google months before it bought start-up at
heart of legal battle Elizabeth Weise , USATODAY
SAN FRANCISCO -- Six months before Uber bought'the self-driving truck'start-up
at the heart of a contentious legal battle with rival Google, Uber's lawyers
were already discussing the risk of a lawsuit. Emails between Uber's lawyers,
revealed at a hearing Wednesday in San Francisco, raise the possibility Uber
knew it was buying stolen intellectual property when it acquired Otto, the
company founded by ex-Google engineer Anthony Levandowski, for $680 million in
August 2016.
Uber and Waymo -- the new name of Google's pioneering self-driving car
division -- are engaged in a high-stakes suit over the foundational technology
that Uber bought to springboard its self-driving car ambitions, and which Waymo
claims as its own.
Uber has called Waymo's charges baseless, and said there is no evidence that
any
of the 14,000 files in question ever touched Uber's servers.
Waymo's February suit charged'Levandowski with'surreptitiously downloading
14,000 files that included plans for Waymo's version of LiDAR, a'critical
sensing method for self-driving cars,'from company computers in December 2015.
He left
the company a month later.
Three days after Levandowski left, Uber's lawyers were discussing potential
legal issues around buying Levandowski's yet-to-be-launched firm, according to
discovery discussions for the case.
During the hearing, which began with dry descriptions of laser patents and
ended
with testy'confrontations between the two companies' lawyers, Waymo lawyers
said
they had received a log of documents from Uber at 11:00 pm Tuesday night that
was 700 pages long. Included in the documents: a log including emails about
providing legal analysis or advice on possible due diligence about the
potential
acquisition of Otto, which wouldn't launch out of stealth mode until May.
In August, when Uber announced it was buying the start-up, it tapped
Levandowski
to run its nascent self-driving car efforts. "So we have this incredible
situation where days after Mr. Levandowski leaves Google, and months and months
before any acquisition, it's being discussed in email," on January 29, 2016,
said David Perlson, a Waymo lawyer with Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.
The potentially pivotal lawsuit between the two companies could impact the
future of autonomous vehicles and who has access to crucial technology that
will
make them possible.
In a case centered on the alleged theft of reams of information, what hasn't
been revealed are the 14,000 pages of documents Waymo claims Levandowski stole.
Uber argues that Waymo is asking for too much information and that it cannot
possibly find all the documents being requested within the timeframe required.
U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup on Wednesday suggested it shouldn't be
that difficult to locate them. "There's a thumb drive somewhere with all the
documents downloaded from Waymo," he said, and gave Uber until Wednesday at
noon
to produce the requested documents.
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