Judge holds Uber's feet to the fire over alleged Waymo tech theft A California judge is not taking any nonsense in the ongoing self-driving tech theft case between Uber and Google-owned Waymo. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Corley ruled earlier this month that Uber must hand over what may be critical due diligence reports in the case. She was immediately faced with a wave of letters, legal …
It's certainly appears that Stroz Friedberg doesn't want their due diligence report to be made public. Really, really, really doesn't want it out.
What are the possibilities:
1. They didn't find any issues, and documented how a few months old company developed technology that was worth $680M plus an additional chunk of future revenue.
1A. They were incompetent, and missed the obvious similarities to what the founders had been working on at Waymo
1B They did a wonderful job and extensively documented the innovations, along with the differences from the work the founders had done in their previous employment. Since it's a questionable $680M deal, the report would be at least 100K pages long.
2. They found a slew of issues.
2A They accurately wrote a report that pointed out Uber was buying stolen trade secrets. Uber went ahead with the deal anyway. They are objecting to the release because, uhmmm...
2B They wrote a willfully blind report that carefully stepped around the obvious signs.
I'm guessing they were well paid to write a report that was willfully, crudely blind to the issues. If made public (and remember, they didn't even want 'Stroz Friedberg' to be mentioned in court) it would show how unethical they were willing to be.
Agree, it would seem that they were paid by Uber to write a report that cleared Uber of any wrongdoing, because Otto was dealing stolen Google IP and Uber needed a piece of paper which they could hold up to say that they looked into the issue and a third party said that the obviously stolen IP was not stolen.
"it would seem that they were paid by Uber to write a report that cleared Uber of any wrongdoing"
I tend to agree with the previous posters, but I have to ask : what's the point of paying for a fake report to clear you of wrongdoing if you keep it secret ? Wouldn't the point be to wave it immediately in the face of anyone expressing doubts ?
I tend to agree with the previous posters, but I have to ask : what's the point of paying for a fake report to clear you of wrongdoing if you keep it secret ? Wouldn't the point be to wave it immediately in the face of anyone expressing doubts ?
No. Its for for your own legal team. The point would be to wave it in the face of your lawyers so that they can stand up in court and say (with a straight face and without committing perjury) that they believe that you did the necessary due diligence and that the report showed that there was nothing wrong.
Likely true. It is a legal document so they can create plausible deniability. Allows them to shift the blame on to the third party firm and allows them to say they did due diligence. They looked into it, a third party with (supposed) expertise told them they were all clear... what do you want from Uber. Sounds like you have a problem with the third party analyst firm.... They don't want to air it in public because everyone is instantly going to read between the lines and see that Uber paid the analysts, the analysts wrote what they knew Uber wanted to see, and this just a legal smoke screen.
Uber, Otto (on paper holding company for stolen Google IP), and Levandowski are so obviously guilty here. I don't know why Uber doesn't just attempt to settle with Google for a billion or two, maybe take a license... or just hand over the self driving division and all it's IP to Google.
Just further confirmation that Uber is a a completely unethical company. They had to know that Otto didn't cook all this IP up from scratch in a couple of months. No way they are that stupid. It seems that there is some circumstantial evidence that Uber actually put Levandowski up to stealing Google IP, then told him to found some company... which they would (wink, wink) be interested in acquiring after a few months. I hope Google owns Uber.
"I don't know why Uber doesn't just attempt to settle with Google for a billion or two"
Do they even have a billion or two? Not only have Uber never made a profit, they appear to be losing more and more money every year - nearly $3 billion in 2016. According to Wiki, they've raised a total of $11.5 billion over the course of 8 years; this isn't Apple or Google who can afford the odd billion dollar settlement without much issue, that kind of thing on top of their already massive losses could well wipe them out entirely.
Probably because the self-driving division is the point of Uber. They use human drivers now because (1) the tech isn't ready and (2) they are building a huge database of driver and consumer behavior that will help them to build a better automated system without those pesky contractors asking for a cut of the fares.
Uber doesn't have a billion or two. As a taxi company it is running entirely on empty, propped up by investment money. Investors did not put millions into the company just to hand it to Google in legal settlements.
And why would Google want to licence the technology to Uber?
The more likely outcomes are;
- Uber hands everything back to Google, and gets whacked by a massive fine into the bargain
- Google buys Uber for a song.
Probably true, until they go public they probably cannot easily come up with billions to settle this suit. I think you are probably right. They either A) Hand over the entire self driving car division to Google and some payment for taking Google's tech and spreading it around. B) Google just buys Uber for a song and the lawsuit goes away.
More like our collective pension funds via Venture Capital, face massive damage.
And why the drawn out farcical circus?
Give the parties 7 days to produce the (existing) documents. On failure to do so, jail the people involved until their colleagues/firms produce the docs.
Spend 30 mins finding the relevant facts, then as appears likely, case over.
What about other parties to the $680m deal to buy Otto, in essence a pre-planned deal to acquire stolen property, nay to instugate theft of, and make it look legit.
Surely, every party who played a part in that deal, including those who took professional adviser fees or financial fees for doing so are just as guilty of the crimes committed as are Uber execs?
The Feds could do a lot more for the ordinary people of the world by looking into ALL of this, rather than effing about with Clinton's e-mails.
If your pension fund is involved in Venture Captial to any significant degree then you should sack them and move elsewhere. It's far too volatile an area for them to be involved with, and shouldn't be used by anyone or any company that can't afford to write off an investment completely and move on.
Will I ever get Uber this? Can anyone give me a Lyft?
Sorry, this case is a joke in many ways. I just can't take these people seriously and I have some sympathy for the judge.
Waymo? I wonder what kind of company they were if Levandowski was one of their guys. But they were the ones to get rid of him. As always, I imagine it's best to wait for some details before passing judgement.
So it's safe to say that Uber, Otto and Levandowski would rather the due diligence reports stay under wraps.
On the contrary, if handing over the documents would prove their innocence, then I'd say it's safe to say that they would be bending over backwards to provide them. Uber really needs this case to go away, because the longer it goes on, the worse their position is going to get. If the reports show they did nothing wrong, then handing over them over would go a very long way toward shutting down the whole case against them; Google may still have a case against the engineer, but not against Uber.
I know there are good commercial reasons for not wanting to hand them over, but at this point if they can provide proof of innocence, that must surely outweigh any commercial consideration.
So it follows that the only reason they would rather keep them under wraps is if they know that the reports would prove their guilt. (If you're being charitable, then perhaps it might be because they aren't sure which way it would go legally, but frankly they've had time now to review them and get an opinion on that)
So every argument they make against handing them over is doing nothing other than adding weight to the suspicions against them.
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