Uber denies Waymo theft claims on grounds it never used custom LiDAR | Hacker News Reader

Uber denies Waymo theft claims on grounds it never used custom LiDAR

techcrunch.com

61 pointsstingrae55 comments

So time to clear up what appears to be a few misconceptions on this thread:

The hearing so far has been about Waymo filing a preliminary injunction against Uber. The scope of the injunction requested was along the lines of "uber needs to stop building all self driving cars until we're done with this civil case". What Uber is arguing is "you're [waymo] saying that we stole your LIDAR, but all of the Lidar tech we use is off the shelf velodyne stuff, which is super obvious that we didn't steal, we purchased from velodyne, this is not worthy on an injunction". Waymo then argued that uber was independently develeoping its own lidar system in parallel with the velodyne stuff it was using, and it wants to stop development there, and uber rebutted along the lines of "there are huge material differences between the lidar we're designing, and the lidar waymo uses, so even if levandowski stole a bunch of info and has it on his personal computer, its not in our product or our research pipeline, or servers, so your theft issue with with our boy levy, not with us, uber the company."

All of the argument so far are around the injunction, the actual trial happens in october.

"Uber denies Waymo theft claims on grounds it never used custom LiDAR"

"Uber admitted in court filings today that it still uses commercially-available LiDAR systems in its self-driving vehicles because its in-house technology isn’t ready for the road."

Am I reading this right. Uber is saying that they shouldn't be sued as they haven't used the stolen information in their self driving cars on the road. However they are not saying if they have used stolen information to make their own lidar units that are currently in development.

I'm assuming they are doing this so that the injunction only applies to their custom lidar tech.

No, they're also claiming that their LiDAR is "fundamentally different" than Waymo's.

How would Uber know they are different implementations unless they knew what Google's implementation consists of?

Not defending Uber here (it's pretty obvious that they fucked up big time here), but in these cases it's common to allow counsel (and counsel only) to look at both companies' IP as part of the discovery process. Counsel then giving access to information they found in that process would be grounds for pretty immediate disbarring.

as I understand it, some of the details of google's implementation came out through discovery and are available to a teeny tiny team of lawyers of uber (maybe even just one lawyer), but not the engineers. This is standard legal procedure.

I thought the most interesting but unexplained phrase in the piece was "contrary to paperwork filed with the Nevada DMV".

As in, "Uber also claims that, contrary to paperwork filed with the Nevada DMV, it has never deployed a custom LiDAR system in any of its cars or trucks and will not be ready to do so by the time the case is slated to go to trial in October."

(Edit for formatting.)

So, what paperwork did they file with the Nevada DMV? Was it for a permit for them to run driverless cars on Nevada's roads? Did they lie to Nevada in the process of trying to get that permission?

Or is there a more benign explanation of that statement? (I suppose it could have been a non-material error...)

It is explained further down actually:

"But in paperwork filed with Nevada regulators last July, Otto claimed that it “developed in house and/or currently deployed” a 64-laser LiDAR system in its autonomous trucks. Uber now says this was an error. “Every single self-driving car that Uber has put on the road to date uses commercially available LiDAR sensors from third parties,” Uber wrote in its filing."

The latest statement, at least the part quoted here, says nothing about the "developed in-house" clause of the initial paperwork.

There doesn't seem to be any direct evidence against Uber itself so far, which makes me question why Uber didn't fire Levandowski five minutes after he plead the fifth and refused to let his personal devices be searched for the stolen files. It would go a long way towards removing their guilt through association, and weaken Google's case against Uber (Levandowski seems hosed either way).

As an outsider, I can only think of one logical reason why they haven't done this. It seems likely that someone in Uber -- possibly Travis Kalanick himself -- knew about the IP theft ahead of time and approved the purchase of Levandowski's company anyway. So if they throw Levandowski under the bus, he may turn around and testify against Uber proper as part of a plea bargain. This fits the old law of criminal conspiracies: you have to hang together, or else you'll all hang separately. :)

Hypothetical question for the IP lawyers on here:

Lets say we have two companies, evilCorp and goodCorp. goodCorp files a law suit against against evilCorp alleging that evilCorp stolen trade secrets for its self driving cars, and they file an injunction against evilCorp for it to stop developing self driving cars. During the injunction process, it is discovered that evilCorp has two separate departments, espionage and development, and the two departments never talk to each other, ever, and thats a provable fact somehow. The espionage department has in its possession stolen documents from goodCorp, but the self driving car project in the development department is very clearly entirely different from what is in those stolen documents, has its own dev, etc. What happens to evilCorp in the civil case?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

Wasn't the lawsuit kicked off by Waymo accidentally receiving an attachment intended for Uber from a manufacturer that looked incredibly similar to their designs? Isn't that design proof that they were using Waymo's custom LiDAR?

The LIDAR issue is a sideshow. Neither Waymo nor Uber should be developing a LIDAR; that's what parts suppliers are for. Until recently, the available LIDAR options sucked, but it's getting better. It will get a lot better when Continental, the big auto parts manufacturer, turns on production of the flash LIDAR technology from Advanced Scientific Concepts.[1] That's known to work well; it just costs too much in small volume. They could probably make those units in volume now, but it's too soon to turn on the parts factory and make millions of them. No market volume yet. Or maybe Quantergy, a startup which says they are "the leading provider of solid state LiDAR sensors" but isn't shipping, will get their act together.

Waymo only found about about the LIDAR thing by accident. The question is, how much other technology did Uber get?

[1] http://www.continental-corporation.com/www/pressportal_com_e...

I disagree that they shouldn't be developing LIDAR. It is such a critical piece of Waymo's implementation that they would be fools not to have a development program.

Google has more money to invest in this than any part supplier. Why would they let another company own their destiny?

So once the injunction is served (which is looking increasingly likely), what will the spillover effects look like? I'm assuming Uber valuation tanks at this point, but how does that propagate?

i don't know why an injunction would be served if Uber's in-house technology is significantly different from Waymo's. That, and the fact that Uber is apparently using 3rd-party hardware on their current self-driving vehicles.

"Uber also claims that, contrary to paperwork filed with the Nevada DMV, it has never deployed a custom LiDAR system in any of its cars or trucks and will not be ready to do so by the time the case is slated to go to trial in October."

via https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/07/ubers-legal-defense-waym... --

"A Waymo spokesperson told Engadget: "Uber's assertion that they've never touched the 14,000 stolen files is disingenuous at best, given their refusal to look in the most obvious place: the computers and devices owned by the head of their self-driving program. We're asking the court to step in based on clear evidence that Uber is using, or plans to use, our trade secrets to develop their LiDAR technology, as seen in both circuit board blueprints and filings in the State of Nevada."

If they've legally filed with the state of Nevada as using proprietary LiDAR tech, doesn't that put the nail in the coffin?

As an aside, if it is found that the stolen documents were disseminated internally, don't they have a near-impossible burden of proof that no trade secrets were integrated into the braintrust of the company? How is this typically handled? I imagine it involves rebuilding the division and dismissing any previous project participants.

Additional information on Nevada filings --

https://backchannel.com/how-my-public-records-request-trigge...

"Otto noted that it had developed an “in-house custom built 64-laser (Class 1) emitting 6.4 million beams a second at 10Hz.”"

...

"Lidow explained that many lidars today use 32 lasers and 1 or 2 million beams per second, and that a 64-laser system emitting 6.4 million beams a second would give superior vertical resolution and quicker refreshes. This would be better able to capture small, fast objects such as bouncing balls or animals darting into the road. It would also be technically challenging to build. “But I don’t think the speed of the system or the number of laser pulses are definitive in any way to tell you whose system it is,” he said."

While Velodyne has a 64 channel product, I can't find any reference of a Velodyne system that comes close to that 6.4M beam per second refresh.

It's for high profile cases like this that Groklaw was an indispensibile site for in-depth legal analysis. Are there any sites that offer similar content like techdirt?

Pacer :-)

Isn't this like saying you didn't steal a CD because you never listened to it?

> “Then why did he steal this stuff? That’s the story the jury’s going to want to know about,” Judge William Alsup retorted.

I find it alarming that the judge assumes a "guilty until proven innocent" position. Obviously outsiders like us would take a stance like this, but for a judge on the bench to operate in that manner sets off all kinds of red flags for me.

> I find it alarming that the judge assumes a "guilty until proven innocent" position

I find this more of a waymo provided enough information for a the judge to rule a `guilty` verdict. However the judge does not yet know who to apply the guilty verdict to, and how sever the punishment needs to be.

Also this is a civil suit not a criminal one. The same rules do not apply.

IANAL.

Maybe I'm wrong, but the whole point of this case is to prove this. I would find a more impartial adjudicator to take more of a "the motives contradict with the allegations of theft" view.

To outright say that the theft occurs before an official judgement was made seems in poor taste for, well, a judge.

Google has logs. Google made assertions with the logs backing them up. Uber (to my knowledge) has not denied the assertions. The employee in question (to my knowledge) has not denied the assertions.

It's a civil case. That's probably enough.

The bar in civil cases is preponderance of the evidence, of which Google has plenty and Uber / Levandowski have shown very little. It seems beyond sufficient at this point anyway.

Worth noting that while I might otherwise agree with your position, the thing you're missing here is that this isn't a case as you're used to seeing them, and neither guilt nor innocence is being determined here. Preliminary injunctions function very differently from other legal proceedings.

What Waymo might do is offer proof that Lewandowski stole the documents. What Uber might do is offer proof that he didn't, or that even if he did, it doesn't matter for some other reason. In determining whether or not an injunction can proceed, the judge isn't being asked to determine guilt or innocence, but to determine, based on the strength of the evidence, whether or not they might later find something like guilt or innocence enough that an injunction should or should not be granted.

If Waymo were to offer continuous video of Lewandowski stealing the documents and taking them to Uber, uploading it to their servers, and then implementing them in their self-driving cars, a judge would almost certainly find that guilt is probable enough to establish positive grounds for issuing an injunction, but that does not mean that Lewandowski is found guilty in the way that we usually associate guilt.

My (admittedly limited) understanding of the case so far is that neither Uber nor the former Google employee dispute that the theft did in fact take place.

Forgive my ignorance, but can Uber dispute that the theft did in fact take place if ther former Google employee isn't saying anything? Could they not be as ignorant as you or I?

They could be as ignorant, but the fact that they haven't forced their employee to disclose anything appears to the judge that they're trying to have their cake and eat it too.

No, you're wrong. Uber doesn't know if Levandowski stole the documents or not. But they are saying it doesn't matter, that any stolen documents are between the individual and Google, because none of those documents made it into Uber's code base or designs, and none of Google's designs are in their current research Lidar, which was developed by an entirely different company that was bought before Levandowski even left Google.

Neither Uber nor Levandowski have denied that he downloaded the documents, and apparently Waymo's evidence is pretty strong. The fact that they're arguing "we didn't use those documents" rather than "he never stole those documents before we acquired his company" basically amounts to admitting that he took them.

I think they've admitted the theft of the files in court. As quoted in yesterday's thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14044517 :

> "He downloaded 14,000 files, he wiped clean the computer, and he took [them] with him. That's the record. He’s not denying it. You're not denying it. No one on your side is denying he has the 14,000 files."

So, "You've already said he stole the files, why" seems like a perfectly reasonable question for a judge to ask.

In addition to what everyone else here has mentioned, note that this case is not against Levandowski. Google is suing Uber, and even if Alsup thinks that Levandowski is guilty as sin, this won't send him to jail or even render a civil judgment against him.

You're jumping to conclusions by assuming that a federal judge is jumping to conclusions. If you read that and the first thing you think is "that judge can't judge!", that's not good.

Anyways, the judge has made is very clear that the evidence against them is very strong, that the record is very strong, and that so far neither Uber nor Levandowski have denied that he stole the 14 000 documents.

I'm neither a lawyer nor a judge, but I'm just wondering if this is a typical type of thing to assert during a judgement. It just jumped out as impartial to me.

I don't think impartial means what you think it means.

Possibly, I think "impartial" means reserving the judgement until the judgement is to be made at the end of the trial as opposed to in the middle of the trial, which could very well be wrong - IANAL.

And that's where you're very wrong. Large portions of a trial require judgements to have already been made, even if they've not been written down in a definitive 'judgement' yet. Alsup has made it clear that he's decided that it is a 'matter of fact' that Levandowski stole documents. Now they're arguing over who's responsible and liable.

IANAL, so I might be way off base.

You would be entirely wrong.

A trial like this is not a single giant evidence dump followed by a giant decision. It is a series of hearings. After each hearing something can be ruled on. You can issue a subpoena to collect more information about A, we have settled B as a fact, you are misreading the law so you have to drop that line of inquiry, etc.

Each hearing is impartial. But impartial decisions come at many points. In fact some points will be appealed to a higher court which will make a ruling and then send it to a lower court again with instructions about how to proceed.

This sort of thing can take years.

Impartial doesn't mean indifferent.

This has been going on for a fair amount of time, the judge has reproached Uber more than once, a lot of evidence has been submitted. It appears that the judge has decided that, at this point, there's enough evidence to say that it's a fact that he stole the documents. They had a chance to challenge the [apparently overwhelming] evidence Google has, and they failed [apparently, also overwhelmingly].

This is typical. Judges that refuse to say anything about arguments they aren't buying are insecure about being too transparent on appeal. More senior judges will tell you rather quickly if they think your argument doesn't hold any water or alternatively that even if your argument is right, you're not going to get the outcome that you're pleading for. They won't 'decide' then and there, but they'll often make it clear that absent some big reveals come discovery time that you're in big trouble.

Neither party is contesting that the documents were stolen [1]. Everyone is basically assuming that he did it; Uber's defense in this preliminary-injunction hearing is that the stolen documents never made it to Uber.

[1] http://wsau.com/news/articles/2017/mar/31/waymo-uber-judge-s...

Yes, this looks like it's more to establish that it was one guy alone and has never had any impact on the organization, their processes, etc.

If they can do that, it would change from Uber vs Waymo/Alphabet to Levandowski vs Waymo/Alphabet and Levandowski vs Uber.

If I was Uber, I know which fight I'd want to step into.

Uber wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to not be stopped by an injunction from Waymo, but it also wants to keep Levandowski as the head of its self-driving car program. Probably those two desires are in conflict; probably Waymo will push in the right places to force them to be in conflict.

"Yes, this looks like it's more to establish that it was one guy alone and has never had any impact on the organization, their processes, etc."

Exactly. But unfortunately for Uber, it's a bit hard to establish that when the guy in question is the head of your entire self-driving program!

Because he's taking the fifth amendment privilege against self-incrimination, for civil court purposes they assume his testimony would be as incriminating as possible. Or so waymo is arguing anyway.

Levandowski is guilty (of something, at least). The only question is whether Uber is too.

He took the documents when he started working at a competitor. Coincidence? Or did Uber put him up to it? That's what the judge is getting at.

He downloaded the documents 6 months before leaving the company. Have you ever downloaded a git repository to do some work at home, 6 months before leaving a company? Google hasn't proven that Levandowski actually did anything with those documents, besides downloading them onto a work computer, months before leaving Google. They don't even know if he copied those files off his laptop. Could it be conceivable that he was actually just working on those files?

Google does not allow source code on non-Google managed devices, or even laptops that are Google managed. You have to be constantly behind Google's firewall to access and develop code, which makes working from home rather difficult.

Waymo claims (and Uber has not refuted) that "he downloaded 9.7 GB of Waymo’s highly confidential files and trade secrets, including blueprints, design files and testing documentation. Then he connected an external drive to the laptop. Mr. Levandowski then wiped and reformatted the laptop in an attempt to erase forensic fingerprints." [0]

That sort of shoots a hole in the "downloaded to work on at home argument", much like if you go into a bank with a gun, a stocking over your head, and a friend waiting outside in a running car would tend to make your story about just wanting to make a withdrawal pretty suspect.

[0] https://medium.com/waymo/a-note-on-our-lawsuit-against-otto-...

EDIT: One thing I got wrong is that it was 6 weeks, not 6 months in my original post.

He connected an external drive to the laptop. That's all they know. They didn't say he copied the files onto the external drive. If he did copy them onto the external drive, they would have said this. So now we have to parse their statements.

Do they know he copied those files onto the external drive? No. Did he have a movie on there that he viewed? They don't know, apparently.

And he wiped and reformatted his laptop. When did he do this? Did he do this immediately? Or did he do it weeks later? They didn't specify this either. I would love more information about this, if he did this all in one night. If they explicitly say he downloaded a repo, he copied it to an external usb drive, and then wiped his laptop all in the course of an hour, that's certainly suspicious. But that's not what they said.

Based on what they said, he could have downloaded the repo, worked on it for many days or weeks, attached a usb drive at any point, and wiped the laptop clean before he handed the laptop back to them 6 weeks later. I would love for them to clarify this, because right now they are the purveyors of this information.

There were two points, both addressing "working on files from home"

The general point, disregarding the way in which he downloaded the files and then wiped his computer, is that Google generally has a policy where you're just not allowed to have local copies of source files to work on a remote machine.

That's something that you'd have to go through quite a bit of effort to circumvent, as the only machines that are allowed to access repos are physically wired to the network.

If you're working remotely, you're accessing a desktop computer through SSH or RDP and working that way. The files (except as caches and network traffic) never really live on your remote machine.

Of course, this only applies to source code and other such files. If you're somebody working on a powerpoint or a design document, you're allowed to download that. And maybe there's a huge exception for Google X (although I doubt that).

But working on source files at home while disconnected to a Google server is not common, encouraged, and by itself, might be a fireable offense and is definitely a violation of IT policies.

>I find it alarming that the judge assumes a "guilty until proven innocent" position.

No, we are in the pre-trial phase. What has been happening is that Judge Alsup ordered Uber several weeks ago to do discovery, and Uber has been resisting doing it as ordered. Alsup has been getting more upset, and is now threatening an injunction if Uber doesn't comply.

At this session Uber argued, in effect, "We don't need to do discovery correctly because we are innocent." It is quite unlikely Alsup will be persuaded by this argument.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com