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 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.
To outright say that the theft occurs before an official judgement was made seems in poor taste for, well, a judge.
It's a civil case. That's probably enough.
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.
[1] http://wsau.com/news/articles/2017/mar/31/waymo-uber-judge-s...
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.
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!
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.
IANAL, so I might be way off base.
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.
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].
> "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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.