After months of breathless anticipation and a week of bro-tastic testimony, the Waymo v. Uber lawsuit, in which Google’s driverless tech arm sued the ride-hailing pioneer over allegedly stolen autonomous vehicle technology, is over. Another text referenced a line from the movie “Wall Street” proclaiming that, “Greed is good”. Even if it did, it will be hard to justify stealing trade secrets in retaliation.
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The goal was not only to “leapfrog” Google in the race to build self-driving cars, Waymo lawyers alleged, but to keep Uber alive. Federal judge William Alsup, who is presiding over a trial that was a year in the making, called the case “ancient history”.
“Engineers. are free to go from one job to another, and they don’t get a lobotomy in between”, Carmody said, adding that skills, talents and publicly known ideas can properly be brought from one job to another.
On the witness stand, Kalanick brushed off the suggestion that the link was loaded was significance and sparred a bit with Waymo attorney Charles Verhoeven, who asked Kalanick if he clicked on the link. “I thank both sides”, he said.
Kalanick: “That’s a movie, it’s fake”.
Read the last lines of Khosrowshahi’s statement and you’ll see what I mean.
This is how Kalanick described Uber and Google’s early relationship. “There’s no cheating – there’s not a single piece of Google proprietary information at Uber”, Carmody said.
White board images taken at the January 3, 2016, meeting showed notes from Kalanick highlighting how Uber could benefit from working with Levandowski and the then-unnamed company, including “laser is the sauce”. It is unclear how much Levandowski, already a wealthy man thanks to a $120 million bonus from his time at Google, personally made in the deal.
“It’s not as great as we had thought at the beginning”, he said. He continued to praise the company he started and used the word “us” when talking about Uber despite resigning in June.
Uber Technologies settled the highstakes trade-secret theft lawsuit brought by Waymo, resolving a conflict that already cost the ridehailing giant its top driverless vehicle engineer and threatened to further embarrass the company. But after this morning, Uber is looking more and more like Khosrowshahi’s company now.
His testimony capped the second day of the trial.
Waymo had previously estimated damages in the case at about $1.9 billion, which Uber rejected. He said he was “a big fan” of the engineer, one of the first employees at Google’s self-driving-car project, and wanted to hire him.
Uber is paying $245 million to Google’s self-driving auto spinoff to end a legal brawl that aired out allegations of a sinister scheme that tore apart the once-friendly companies. Given that landscape, along with the fact that Alphabet CEO Larry Page could have had to testify next week, the settlement makes sense for Waymo, she said. He and co-founder Sergey Brin famously created the popular search engine out of garage in 1998. After the hug, Kalanick left the courtroom. That percentage would equal about $245 million.
“Their risks would have gone up on many levels”, Rowe said.
The evidence uncovered so far doesn’t look so good for Uber.
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Once the trial began, Waymo offered a settlement price of $500 million.
