Let's go live to the Uber-Waymo legal war – and see what's happening It promised to be an eye-opening battle royale between tech giants. So let's check in with Uber and Waymo, the ride-hailing app maker and the Google self-driving car spinoff, which are duking it out in court. When autonomous vehicle upstart Waymo sued Uber for patent infringement in February, at first it seemed like a classic …
Judge Alsup : "What if it turns out that Uber is totally innocent?," he asked, and the company simply paid for a gifted engineer with no idea he was downloading documents?
I understand salaries in the tech field are rather high, but paying $250million, even for a gifted engineer, is rather exhorbitant.
Of course it's not his final Judgment just a little musing.
The evidence (from the article) against Uber/Waymo appears compelling. Why on earth do court cases take so long? Yes, yes, i know, billable hours. Rounded up from units of 10 secs each.
If i were the Judge the case would be over before lunch.
$680m pays for a small army of nerds.
Of was it just him?
And a note that $250m was a stock option, not a recruitment bonus, no doubt well below what Uber reckons their stock is worth.
But since Uber is not yet publicly quoted and has multiple issues that $250m of stock might not be nearly quite as valuable as the powdered Unicorn horn Uber think they are.
My first signing bonus was a bottle of champagne. I never opened it as I didn't think a new job was that worthy. I'm still waiting for that occasion.
If adults were involved in this discussion and not lawyers and spoilt children, the whole situation should have gone something like this:
Über hired a guy they thought was good. It turns out he stole all the good work from his previous Company (I'm giving Über the benefit of the doubt here that they didnt collude in the theft, adults give people the benefit of the doubt, up to a point). When his theft was proven to them, they fired his ass, and handed him over to the Police for theft. Then Über started talks with Waymo about creating a licencing agreement so that they could continue to use the Technology. Perhaps some sort of data sharing arrangement, so they could both benefit from the work they had done on the Technology. And in this way, the Technology improved, company ethics were maintained, both firms continued along their development, money was saved on not having to pay lawyers and court costs, and a thief ended up in jail.
But no, Über doesnt work that way (corporate ethics? They've heard of them - something to do with hiring foreigners, right?), and so we end up in court, with huge costs, both sides looking bad, and the Technology being stalled. Hooray for modern America, right?
Waymo is still developing its technology -- their cars are frequently visible driving in the Mountain View area, at least.
All the excitement up in SF may help explain the high housing prices there -- police "encountering" stabbings on the street and so forth. Who wouldn't want to live there and have a front row view?
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