Ouch.
For those of us on the outside, while we are justified in considering that a possible hypothesis, we are also justified in looking at the facts and considering that it may indeed be the case that these documents were never given to Uber. I for one have no trouble believing that the documents were downloaded by an individual but that they were never given to Uber, as I rather suspect "keeping more than one really ought from one's previous job but never raising to the level of actually giving that stuff to one's next employer" is really quite common.
Then they should have their legal team pilloried and set ablaze for advising them to be this cagey.
- Go for it and see if anyone complains
- See if ignoring the complainers makes them go away
- See if bullying the complainers makes them go away
- Can it be solved with money?
- Last resort: cheat.
- If you get caught, call the lawyers; in public, whine about the raw deal you're getting.
I'm going to bed.
I've never been bullish on Uber, but this is really bad.
1) If the suit is true, then it will almost certainly zero out the investors, and destroy the careers and fortunes of the executives.
2) Uber has a long history of keeping and promoting executives who lack integrity and show a willingness to break the law.
As such, it is reasonable to assume that Google is making a good faith effort to argue the strongest possible case on their side; and that Uber is likely to lie, cheat, and steal to make the strongest possible case on their side.
Knowing almost nothing about US Federal civil law, can inferences be drawn from that (and other previous behaviour of Uber)?
Implicit assumption? The first paragraph of the TechCrunch article says:
Uber admitted today that it had found one of the documents Waymo alleges was stolen by a former employee — who left its self-driving car effort to join Uber’s — on the employee’s personal computer.The other day I booted my old galaxy s3 to put a new ROM on it and turn it into a dashcam. I found on it that google drive had offline backed-up some documents from a company I had worked at several years ago, and no longer did. Should I be sued for trade secret theft?
The fact that they've only found one document and only on the personal laptop of a single employee seems to suggest that they actually did a good job in due diligence.
Does anyone know how many former Waymo engineers now work at Uber?
>Waymo says he took 14,000 documents, while Kshirsagar and Radu Raduta took only a few. Waymo is now asking for Uber to turn over those stolen documents as part of the discovery process
My understanding is that part of the case is deciding if it is true that 14,000 documents were taken.
So again, the only known truth is that a single document was found on a guy's device.
What I am concerned with is that we all fall into the "Uber BAD, Waymo GOOD" trap simply because Waymo is kicking up a big shitstorm. Let the process of law happen, let the facts of the case arise, before we pass judgement.
Of course, the documentation from Waymo/Google is also pretty strong apparently. Simply saying "I didn't do that" would be insufficient.
So he should give up his 5th amendment right to fend off an accusation? I don't think so, that doesn't sound like justice to me.
>documentation from Waymo/Google is also pretty strong apparently.
pretty
apparently
Come on man, you know what angle I'll go for here. Why are you letting that slip? The documentation aka evidence hasn't been seen yet because this case hasn't gone to court. None of the most relevant facts of the case have come to light.
I'm happy to hop on the "Uber is evil" train after the case, but it is painful to watch the normally quite rational people on HN fall for such a typical fallacy of justice.
> So he should give up his 5th amendment right to fend off an accusation? I don't think so, that doesn't sound like justice to me.
That's how the 5th amendment works. It gives you the right to avoid self-incrimination, but if you invoke that right and there is other evidence against you then you'd better have some other way of refuting that evidence.
edit: given that even a simple question was downvoted, I can only conclude that there are likely a lot of Google employees downvoting anything that doesn't support Google's side in this dispute.
GOOG-ACCOUNTING-REF:3FX/ASTRO/15/TURFWAR/PROJECTSOROS
Yes it has - or at least enough that the judge found it compelling. I'd speculate it was something like download logs or something. From the reporting of the story I've read there doesn't seem to be anyone arguing that Lewandowsky didn't access the files. The question seems to be about if they made it to Uber.
I any case I don't think that is relevant to the question regrading the 5th amendment, and I suspect that is why you are being downvoted.
Lewandowsky and Uber's interests don't align here. It's pretty easy to see a scenario where Uber loses this case and then sues Lewandowsky.
Of course Uber wants Lewandowsky to give up his rights here. Lewandowsky has some pretty complex trade-offs to consider.
given that even a simple question was downvoted, I can only conclude that there are likely a lot of Google employees downvoting anything that doesn't support Google's side in this dispute.
I'm not sure how you figure that. I'd imagine it would be Uber employee's downvoting you, since your question really shows the big problems Uber is facing.
You're missing the point. The fifth just says that you can't have your silence held against you. Once you answer the question by saying anything at all, then the answers can be used against you, especially if you're lying. I believe he's under oath in these proceedings.
> None of the most relevant facts of the case have come to light.
No, we're talking about the judge's statements, somebody who has seen all the evidence and is speaking as a professional jurist.
And unlike the rest of the Uber accusations, he has gone on record with these statements after seeing some fairly strong documented evidence. The fact that we haven't seen it yet is immaterial.
Note that this is really complicated because this is a civil trial, with a different standard of guilt (preponderance vs. beyond a reasonable doubt), and where invoking the 5th Amendment can definitely be held against you. If this were a criminal trial- and he did it correctly- invoking the 5th Amendment could not be used against him, but in civil case, it most definitely can be used against you.
Many people have their opinion on whether Uber is evil or not, but any employer that forces you to give up a right that Constitution affords you if you're potentially facing criminal charges sounds evil to me.
If the court wants him to testify in a civil case instead of asserting his 5th amendment right, they should find a way to guarantee immunity or that he won't face criminal charges.
OJ Simpson pleaded the 5th too and then later took the stand because the criminal case was litigated before the civil case.
Futher, specific to your question: the court doesn't care one way or another. They'll take his testimony if he wants to give it, and they'll have it even easier to make a decision without. A civil court is also unlikely to be in a position to grant any immunity.
Neither google nor the court care about the conflicts of interest on the defendants' side. I'd even agree with you that at-will employment is evil, and legitimately pleading the 5th shouldn't be enough to fire someone. But specifically in this case, Lewandowsky could be fired even if he were employed by the French government – he could then sue himself, and the findings of the google/uber trial would probably determine his claim of wrongful dismissal.
How would lawsuits work if that wasn't possible? Civil lawyers aren't able to use as many powers in evidence gathering as prosecutors. If uber's current tactic was allowed then every company would hire a designated employee who would have a paper trail of all the company's misdoings lead to him. That employee then pleads the fifth, the company does a shrug, and that's the end of the lawsuit
No, he could give up his 5th amendment right to save Uber money. This is a civil proceeding not a criminal one.
They should have litigated against Mr. Lewandowsky after he founded Otto using documents they claim to know he stole more than a year ago.
It is, but that's a much later part of the case. The present part of the case is complying with discovery orders and considering preliminary injunctions, which does weigh what the parties are claiming and able to offer to support those claims, but does not involvethe kind of formal, detailed presentation and weighing of evidence that will happen at trial.
This is such a classic justice tale I'm sure it's memorialized in fable. You get accused of witchcraft: well that's weird, you sure have a lot of herbs around, huh? (bay leaves and garlic) What's that giant kettle for? (making soup. With bay leaves and garlic) Etc. The mere accusation can turn normal things into another incriminating "fact" when that is just not the case.
An accusation with even a tiny bit of evidence supporting it can rightly be the basis of a conclusion of fact when the standard (as is generally the case in civil court) is preponderance of the evidence, and no evidence is presented on the other side.
has not been demonstrated yet. Only the accusation. Furthermore, there's been no judgement.
No kidding. However, the present issues with a request for a preliminary injunction I require the court weighing, based on the information provided by the parties, a number of factors, including likelihood of success on the merits. As the "preliminary" part of the name hints, that's not a final assessment of the evidence, however deliberately wotholding exculpatory evidence now has adverse consequences.
There's no principle in capitalism, nor law, that would require(!) you to level false criminal accusations against competitors. The opposite is true. If Google's case were found to be entirely without merit, and intentionally so, they'd be liable for criminal prosecution themselves.
Even the whole you-must-everyting-to-increase-shareholder-value-shtick is mostly a myth, by the way(mo).
That is not a rhetorical question - I'm pretty sure you're capable of distinguishing the facts of the Waymo case[1] from "some documents ...[from] several years ago".
So, why?
[1] Meetings and other shady activity before quitting, logs of ~14k documents pulled, immediate aqui-hire, etc. etc. etc.
Unless I am mistaken, all that I have read indicates that the 14k doc pull is a part of Waymo's accusation, AKA unproven. The immediate aqui-hire etc could just be a slimy poach.
I don't think the paragraph implies that at all. Rather it says that Uber has not threatened Levandowski with employment sanctions in order to get him to cooperate with its discovery obligations. Uber could do so without running afoul of the 5th amendment as that only binds the government.
Google's lawyer is arguing that the court ought to treat that as constructive non-compliance. There's no implied allegation of perjury or other criminal behavior.
That's a problem with criminal conspiracies - you either have to stand by your partners, or hold a threat worse then jail time over their heads. Easy for a mob boss, less easy for a unicorn.
IANAL but this does not sound good:
Judge: "And if [Levandowski] doesn't testify to that at the deposition, well, I guess Uber -- you know, Uber is -- if you think this is going to help you, my preliminary view of it is it's not going to help you; and that if there's not a clear-cut path to showing that those 14,000 documents weren't used, then you're looking at a preliminary injunction."
Which they just can't do right? Fifth amendment can be used against you in civil cases.
Judge Alsup doesn't seem very sympathetic to that line of reasoning.
He did not, however, decide upon that point at this stage, given that these matters were not properly in front of the court.
Let's not fall into the trap of assuming Waymo is the "good guys" and Uber is the "bad guys." Leveling an accusation isn't hard. Anybody can sue anybody as long as you have enough evidence or a good enough argument to convince a judge to hear the case.
I plead the fifth when I get pulled over, am I a criminal? I don't understand. It seems to me the absolute smartest course of action - place the burden of proof entirely on the opposition, give them nothing to work with you don't have to.
In other words, nobody is saying that he has incriminated himself by pleading the fifth. But in Uber's civil case, he has created some very bad implications and greatly worsened their position, and it wouldn't be unreasonable for them to see him as a liability at this point. This is not a mere accusation by Waymo — his actions indicate that there's something going on here.
And the fifth amendment protects you from "adverse inference" in criminal proceedings. It doesn't protect you in a civil suit, nor does it bind me or others in this thread or the general public to conclude that yes, Levandowsky's trucking company is probably heading for a wall.
> from any old baseless accusation
The accusations may be false, but they are not baseless. They're so strong, in fact, that Uber is probably going to be hit with a preliminary injunction. Baseless accusations, by definition, would not have brought Uber to this stage.
I was saying that most people get fired for any accusation whether they have merit or not.
This employee has an accusation that has substantial merit and is still employed. So thats actually broadcasting confidence amongst current and future employees regardless of what kind of thing gets slung their way.
But the obvious explanation (and the one Occam's Razor points us to) is quite different: That Uber would fire Lewandowsky if they thought they could benefit, but they believe standing behind him will minimize their legal liability and/or maximise their chances of benefitting from the purchase of Otto. A normal guy accused of something baseless doesn't have any pull on Uber and their top exec's; Lewandowsky might.
In other words, your conclusion is that "if they're standing behind this guy when everything is pushing them to fire him, they'd NEVER fire a normal guy!" A better conclusion is probably "if they're standing behind this guy when everything is pushing them to fire him, there must be something really strong forcing them not to. A normal guy would still be screwed, because they don't have...whatever Lewandowsky has."
I mean, obviously we don't know what Uber's top execs are thinking, or what really happened with Lewandowsky and Otto. But we know a bit about how Uber think in general, and we've seen some past decisions they've made. Do you really argue selfless altruism and employee loyalty is the most likely explanation here?