If not, it would be the worst IP miss since Ebay acquired Skype for $2 Billion, only to find out that they didn't own Skype's IP or have access to the source code [0].
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/09/18/new-lawsuit-brings-clarity....
Uber's big problem is not the $680 million. It's that if Waymo's claims are true, then Uber's self-driving car program will likely be shut down, and they will have to start all over from scratch.
And that in turn means other companies are going to beat them, likely by years, to fielding self-driving taxis, and that would be the end of Uber.
They would then have to hire a new team of people who never worked at Google, or with the former Googlers, and do a "clean room" reimplementation of a self driving vehicle, based on publically available materials and tools.
Can the knowledge they already obtained really be undone?
Seeing maybe the LIDAR efforts suffer a temporary setback, but any outcome that blocks all the work of all the engineers that all exercised their at-will rights to work for a different company is not something any engineer should be celebrating.
There's a lot more to SDCs than a LIDAR device and the engineers at Uber were working on all these different areas well before Otto even existed.
If Google sought to actually shut everything down, then they will have strayed very very far from the "Don't be evil" mantra and would be the company that truly deserves negative criticism IMHO.
I think one of the crazy things about all this is that having files from a previous employer is not a smoking gun. I wouldn't be surprised that with the blurring or work and life boundaries that a significant portion of people on HN have files from a previous employer on their personal computers. I still to this day occasionally find emails and files from prior employers for whom I haven't worked for in almost a decade now, including employers in an industry I've long since left behind. When I encounter them, I just delete them andget on with my day. Still having these files is nothing malicious on my part. It was often work that followed me home or files emailed around to print while on a business trip or any number of completely non-malicious reasons. This also extends to private code repos on github (many engineers use the same github account for both personal work and professional work). Check your personal computer and email for files from a previous employer. Do you have zero files from your previous employers lying around accidentally?
Thus far discovery has found a single file on a personal computer of one former Waymo engineer and no files on Uber computers using the terms requested by Waymo in discovery. To me that suggests that Google does a pretty good job of keeping work on Google's infrastructure (probably because most code only is useful on their specialized infrastructure) and that the overwhelming majority of former Waymo engineers are honest people doing honest work. There is literally one and only one engineer whose conduct has been called into question and that is Levandowski. Yes, he's the head of it all, but if discovery using the terms Waymo turned up nothing on Uber's machines then the files likely never made it to Uber. At best the knowledge from those files was laundered through Levandowski's mind, but even then without his personal computer showing that he still has those files and he's opened them since leaving Google, it's reasonable to assume that any knowledge he's past along was knowledge he himself created, i.e. it's tacit knowledge earn through his many years of professional experience.
Google is bleeding engineers to Uber. Why I don't know. It could be bureaucracy at Google and the lack of bureaucracy at Uber or Uber just made a better offer. One thing for sure is that if I were a Google engineer I would fear the ability to change employers to Uber right now because Google is going after many former Waymo engineers and not just the one engineer they have evidence for. This means that these engineers have fewer prospects to shop around their skills. That's evil in my book and as bad as the wage fixing collusion between companies like Google, Apple, Palm, Pixar, etc. Self driving car engineers are worth a lot of money in the market right now and Google filing this lawsuit against not a single engineer accused of wrongdoing but many engineers none of which they have evidence against that are likely honest hardworking people trying to get their market value is evil IMHO. Google should be dealing with Levandowski arbitrage, not dragging other engineers into it that have nothing to do with what Levandowski did when he was at Google.
Maybe you do, I don't. Leaving an employer while retaining a copy of their confidential data is IMO a massively unethical thing to do.
I won't speak for others but when I leave an employer I do not take any data with me, not even notebooks. I may take additional notes about things I do outside of work, but I do this on my own time, and ensure that no source code, emails, or other company data is mixed up in those.
I have previously worked with people who kept their entire notebooks from previous employers. While it might help you solve a problem faster, I personally find that practice hugely unethical. You developed these skills on your former employer's time, and either you know the information well enough to do it again from memory, or you should learn it again on your new employers time. Otherwise the new company is unjustly benefiting from the previous company's investment in you.
However, Uber's behavior is so open and notorious in terms of disregarding policy/rules/regulations/laws that it really wouldn't surprise me that if there is bad behavior here, then evidence exist showing Uber knew or should have known; therefore, if that is the case then even with indemnification, warranties and guarantees in any and all Agreements concerning IP, Uber could be liable.
Still unless that smoking gun evidence is found or some evidence of spoilation to shift the burden, it is a high legal standard to use past bad behaviors as evidence of bad behavior here, unless there is a clear pattern. As easy as it is to demonstrate past bad behavior can it be demonstrated that have knowingly/intentionally/negligently violated IP of its competitors?
"In September 2005, eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion.[13]
In September 2009,[14] Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board announced the acquisition of 65% of Skype for $1.9 billion from eBay, which attributed to the enterprise a market value of $2.92 billion. Microsoft bought Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion."
Looks like Ebay paid 2.6B for Skype, then got 1.9B for 65% of it and presumably another 2.8B for the remaining 35% once Microsoft acquired it. Doesn't sound like such a bad acquisition.
The miss is that eBay completely failed to secure the IP rights to Skype. Zennström (CEO of Skype) was essentially able to sell his company twice and eBay made less than they would have without the mistake.