Judge orders Uber not to use technology lifted from its rival
DETROIT— A federal judge has ordered Uber to stop using technology that a key executive downloaded before he left Waymo, the Alphabet Inc. autonomous car arm that was spun off from Google.
The order filed Monday in a trade secrets theft lawsuit also forces Uber to return all downloaded materials.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco says in the ruling that Waymo has shown compelling evidence that a former star engineer named Anthony Levandowski downloaded confidential files before leaving Waymo. The Judge also says evidence shows that before he left Waymo, Levandowski and Uber planned for Uber to acquire a company formed by Levandowski.
The ruling prevents Uber from using the technology on a navigational tool called Lidar that robotic cars need to see what’s around them.
He issued the ruling on Thursday, but didn’t make it public until the companies had redacted sensitive material.
Alsip ruled that Levandowski must also remain quarantined from Uber’s work on Lidar, but stopped short of issuing a broader order that may have stalled Uber’s program for the duration of the court battle, saying he didn’t find clear evidence of wrongdoing by the ride-hailing com- pany. He granted Waymo’s bid for expedited discovery. A trial is scheduled for October.
Both companies claimed success, with Waymo saying it would use the speedier discovery schedule to “hold Uber fully responsible for its misconduct.” Uber hailed the decision as allowing it to “continue building and utilizing all of its self-driving technology” and said that a trial will “demonstrate that our technology has been built independently.”
Waymo claims that in October 2015, Levandowski and Uber hatched a plan for him to steal confidential information. Two months later, Waymo alleges he downloaded more than 14,000 proprietary files to his laptop. The next month, Levandowski quit and started Otto LLC, which Uber bought that August.
On Thursday, Alsup also referred the allegations to prosecutors to review for a possible criminal case. Levandowski, who isn’t a defendant in Waymo’s suit, has refused to testify, asserting his rights against self-incrimination. With files from Bloomberg