Serial Corporate Criminal Uber Accused Of Stealing Google Technology
Another day, another potential act of criminality by Uber. Waymo, the spinoff from Google focused on autonomous vehicles, has sued Uber for stealing its technology.
The case mostly revolves around a former Google employee, Ron Levandowski, who led Google’s autonomous vehicle effort. Levandowski was a pioneer in autonomous driving vehicles and Google had purchased his start-up company to help get its own program off the ground. Levandowski left Google in 2016 to form a competitor company called Otto. When he left, he also took some other Google engineers and, according to the suit, thousands of documents that included lists of suppliers and engineering and manufacturing details.
By remarkable coincidence, a mere seven months later, shortly after Levandowski received his last multimillion dollar payout from Google, Uber bought Otto in an apparent attempt to get its own autonomous vehicle program on track. With Otto came all those stolen documents as well. Google, now Waymo, was apparently alerted to the theft when a supplier inadvertently copied the company on an email detailing the circuit board behind Uber’s light detection and ranging technology. The circuitry had “a striking resemblance” to the Waymo’s patented technology.
The suit specifically charges “Otto and Uber have taken Waymo’s intellectual property so that they could avoid incurring the risk, time, and expense of independently developing their own technology. Ultimately, this calculated theft reportedly netted Otto employees over half a billion dollars and allowed Uber to revive a stalled program, all at Waymo’s expense.”
Just another day for Uber who is still reeling from the accusation of a former employee about rampant sexual harassment at the company and the complete breakdown and failure of the HR department to actually do its job rather than protecting the predators. The obvious question that hangs out there is whether Uber “poached” Levandowski and the Google trade secrets and Otto was just a temporary placeholder so Levandowski could get his full Google payout. Based on Uber’s history, I’m certainly inclined to believe that’s what happened. And it leads one to wonder, is there anything this serial criminal enterprise will not do?