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Comment by sanguy | Hacker News Reader

Anthony is overrated and a complete psychopath. He doesn't understand it's basic right from wrong. In his mind IP is boundless and his, not Googles. This comes from 5 years of working in fairly close contact. Zero morals. He is what's wrong with Silicon Valley - on equal grounds to Travis from Uber. I can completely see this all being planned for years just like circumventing the iPhone App Store rules. As a Google shareholder I demand they litigate until Uber and Anthony are where they deserve to be; jail.

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I've known him personally, it was clear he'd end up like his hero Gordon Gekko since high school. The saddest part is that he didn't need to, hopefully since he's still young he can redeem him self.

I'm mentally translating that post into what you really think, when not restrained by legal advice...

In your assessment, do you believe Anthony created Otto after discussing a buyout with Travis? In other words do you think it's likely that Travis and Anthony had planned all this before? All the evidence points to Anthony being guilty and Uber likely getting an injunction, but if this was all pre-orchestrated I would like to see jail time

Google claims that Lewandowski visited Uber headquarters to discuss a potential buyout. Obviously it's impossible to know what was said there but the following day Lewandowski quit Google, carrying (as Google claims) every single byte of data related to the autonomous car project.

I say "Google claims" because they haven't proven anything yet but it seems likely, in my opinion, that what they claim is true.

Do you really think he should be in prison for intellectual property infringement?

For nine-figure fraud? What would you propose instead?

(It's fraud when you take advantage by ignoring the established legal rules that everyone else is playing by, however suboptimal those rules are.)

Exactly. People routinely get jail time for three orders of magnitude less fraud.

Someone went to prison for stealing $31 in candy bars [1]. At least he only got 2 years: he faced life in prison.

1: http://www.nola.com/traffic/index.ssf/2016/07/candy_thief_an...

It's much worse in terms of $$$ compared to most muggings, why shouldn't it be a long term sentence?

This is one of the major disconnects in modern society, stealing huge sums of money by rich middle aged white guys is a minor slap on the wrists but stealing a few dollars by young, black guys is let's send them to the slammer and throw away the key.

It's so blatant and ingrained in the system that you can't even see it.

The difference is the use of violence to threaten someone's life, as opposed to moving some numbers on a screen.

However, plenty of white-collar crime has physical effects. More than a few embezzled retirement funds have led to suicides, for example.

How do you tell someone that a store clerk robbed at knifepoint is much worse than having their retirement nest-egg evaporate because of someone they haven't even met? Serious white-collar crime should be pursued and punished much more than it currently is.

I would happily get smacked around if you promised to 'move around' some significant numbers into my banking account.

An obvious difference between IP theft and muggings, however, is that the later also entails threats of violence (and sometimes even assault & battery). That's why robbery is generally considered more heinous than burglary, where the victims are typically not present or asleep. I'd agree though that some sort of dollar figure should be attached to the psychological trauma of being mugged, so that great-enough white-collar crimes can also lead to imprisonment.

I'll bet if you asked most people what they would prefer less, getting beat up or losing $500 million, the would answer the latter.

Which distributed among all Google shareholders is $100 each?

Sure. Basically the guy wronged 5 million people, $100 each. Makes it a significantly greater crime than a comparable mugging of a single victim.

Well, no. Distributed among all Alphabet shareholders it is, from the most recent numbers I've seen, about $85 million each from Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and smaller amounts from everyone else.

Also, in a mugging, the mugged is deprived of whatever was stolen. With IP theft the victim still has use of their IP

There's a difference between illegally downloading a movie instead of paying for it, and stealing technology and using it to bring a competitor to market. The latter is actually taking market share away from the organization it was stolen from, so they are deprived of something tangible.

Not if Uber used his stolen IP to out-compete Google. Then the IP would translate directly into a market opportunity loss.

Absolutely.

Yes

What's your opinion on what the punishment should be?

His theft (supposedly) amounts to nine figures.

The last time something on this magnitude happened was during the financial crisis, and people were (rightly or not) braying for bankers to go to prison.

Are you one of these people?

> intellectual property infringement?

I believe that's a deliberate attempt to illogically equate what Levandowski is being accused of, which is duplicitous, pre-meditated behavior to milk Google out of 100+ million dollars, then take Google's technology to a competitor for another multi-hundred million payout, with something like unintentional patent infringement.

I absolutely believe that if Levandowski is guilty of what he is being accused of that he deserves jail time.

There are people in prison for stealing petty items, how would you propose someone that steals something worth millions be punished? Should the fact that it is an idea and information and not a tangible item make a difference?

Martha Stewart went to jail for making ~$400,000 in insider trading, a far less serious offense.

Actually, they dropped that charge. (Apparently, even if what they thought was true, it would not be considered insider trading legally.). She went to prison for "lying" to investigators about the reasons the sold the stock. 18 U.S.C. § 1001

If I may ask, what was your working relationship with him?

> As a Google shareholder I demand they litigate until Uber and Anthony are where they deserve to be; jail.

Litigation is civil, not criminal.

There may be criminal charges brought though, and Levandowski himself seems to believe there is significant-enough risk of that to assert his fifth amendment right at a recent hearing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/technology/uber-waymo-lev...

> Anthony is overrated

Maybe. He did this. http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah.... At least that's what Google tells me :). Given your history with him, do you know how much of this is true?

> and a complete psychopath

Whoa.. When you say psychopath, I'm translating that to 'ruthless without any morals.' Can you give any examples without giving away other people's personal details?

> As a Google shareholder

Waymo is suing Uber. Not Google. I don't think Google shareholders can vote their shares in other Alphabet companies.

GOOG and GOOGL are now shares in Alphabet. [1]

We're all GOOG shareholders if we have a 401(k) with a large-cap index fund. As a GOOG shareholder, I want an Android phone that doesn't run out of battery after 8 hours of typical use, but I'm probably not gonna get it.

1. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG?p=^GOOG

You might want to try a Pixel phone. I'm on my third generation of Google phones and this one has the best battery life of all.

It is a great phone, if you can track one down. Google isn't making enough of them it seems.

http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/18/14315458/google-pixel-xl-s...

I just ordered an XL last month and got it in 2 weeks. The blue option was out when I went to order, but maybe they got some of the logistics worked out

> As a GOOG shareholder, I want an Android phone that doesn't run out of battery after 8 hours of typical use, but I'm probably not gonna get it.

Probably not from Google.

Bit my most recent phone (UMi Plus) has a 4000mAh battery that has for the first time gotten me in the habit of not plugging it in at the first sight of a charging cable. It's also helped that it's USB-C and charges faster than any previous Android phone I've had.

There are also a few Android phones with 6000mAh battery, and at least one with a 10,000mAh battery that (unfortunately or fortunately depending on how important the battery life is for you) has a less battery hungry screen (and lower resolution) than most similarly priced phones. (both the 6k and 10k phones I mention are available from AliExpress sellers; read reviews carefully...)

The Google pixel does that already. It runs quite long on a single charge. I think it's due to AMOLED.

Here's an article with some more details on him from 2013.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/11/25/auto-correct

That really adds context about Levandowski's vision and engineering drive. I wonder if there are any articles about his reported confrontational behavior.

My impression from working at Google was that lack of respect for property is unfortunately part of Google's culture. I've met this mindset on many occasions, so this whole lawsuit, as well as the fact that Levandowski was allowed to rise high at the company, doesn't surprise me a bit. It's just that in this case it was one of their own engineers using it against them, for a change.

And when you say "property", you mean "intellectual property", right? Those are some pretty different things, you know ;-)

Code, content, project assets, documentation, etc...

Yes. All very different from "car, house, boat".

The meaning of the word "property" extends beyond "car, house, boat".

Sure, but certainly not to code, content, project assets, and documentation.

RMS explains the difference and the intention behind the confusion well: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html

I would love to hear more about this, including any specific examples if you can give them.

- When they acquired my little project (back in 2008) my co-founder and I were told point blank that if we didn't sell to them at a price of their choosing they would just outright copy our product and steal our ideas and do it themselves and we'd get nothing. I don't even think they meant it as much as it was a divide-and-conquer negotiation tactic (which unfortunately worked since my co-founder started to panic after that point and turn against me in the following discussions). We eventually sold (at a low price, given the circumstances) but it kind of set the tone for what would follow. Great way to completely sink an acquisition right from the beginning btw.

- Soon after I started I gave a little demo of what I'd been working on before the acquisition as a side/thesis project. A team related to the one I was working in really liked it and wanted to have it and start a project with it. I was quite honored -- until I found out that the expectation was that I provide everything (code and other resources) for free, since they'd already acquired "my talent", and that would extend even to unrelated stuff that I did before the acquisition (that was literally their argument). It took me two years of explaining and negotiation until they finally paid a modest price for it.

- That not being enough I soon found out that extracting IP from fresh graduates / PhDs is actually quite common at Google. I know many examples where graduates / PhDs were asked to put in code and documentation of their prior/thesis work free of charge. Frankly I think that a lot of fresh graduates don't even realize at that point that they are being screwed out of something that is rightfully theirs (or the universitiy's -- depending on how their contracts were set up).

- The worst came out of people when the perf cycle came up. I've seen it over and over that engineers claimed they "put feature X into Y" when in reality feature X was implemented by another engineer and all they did was contribute some wiring code. Worst of all those kind of tricks not only didn't get caught, but the engineers in question often got rewarded for it.

- And of course the time Google started copying books and put them online for free without asking authors for permission or when they started leeching content off of websites and putting it next to their own ads (see [1]) that's not quite the display of the finest of manners either.

The kicker is that while all these things happened day in day out like it was no big deal most people in the company seemed to be convinced that Google operated on higher ethical standards than other companies. Permanently feeding your employees with "don't be evil" or "do the Googley thing" phrases must have made them think that that was actually the case I guess.

Needless to say I quit on the first day that my "golden handcuffs" came off and never looked back.

[1] https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...

"Do we want to build this or buy this" is a pretty typical decision at all large companies, no? Wouldn't it be supremely strange if Google acquired something without at least considering building it internally?

There's a difference between internally weighing build-vs-buy and openly threatening a pair of hackers in a negotiation with a blatant rip-off.

Fair point: I taught my daughter never to threaten at about 6 years old.

The way I see it, even at Google, small M&A deals are just staffed by a bunch of aggro nerds who have a lot more "egoistic hot shot" than "civilized decorum" about them. It seems possible they were bluffing — getting organizational buy-in and staffing a small project at Google has relatively enormous overhead. So for tiny projects (<$1M), buying is nearly always cheaper.

Best response, I imagine, would be "ok, why don't you guys figure out how much that'll cost you and we'll circle back to talk numbers again. looking forward to it!"

> The way I see it ... deals are just staffed by a bunch of aggro nerds ...

On what facts do you base this perception? If it is Uber we say "culture is set from top". This doesn't apply to Google?

I'm at Google too, and for what it's worth, I haven't seen that mindset at all. It sounds like you were on a team with some shitty people or something.

Well, the FOSS movement believes all software belongs to the world, doesn't it?

No, just free software.

Well this is clear rubbish...

> lack of respect for property is unfortunately part of Google's culture

I've been at Google for more than 7 years and I would not characterize the attitude of any of my colleagues (junior or senior) in this way. If anything, it's the total opposite.

But he must be good. $120M+ in compensation.

Yep. That's Juicero level money.

I'm stealing this as my new expensive / large sum replacement

Make sure to emphasize at the same time with making motions with your hands like you're squeezing a bag of juice.

> is what's wrong with Silicon Valley

this.

This line of reasoning is how Bernie Madoff stole $18 billion. "Look at how successful he is! He must be a great investor!"

One way to look at it is that capitalism basically involves two activities: creating value for others and moving money into your very own pocket. Overall, they're correlated. They have to be, or the system would collapse. But in any specific instance, a rich person may only be good at one of them.

Nothing about IP is basic right from wrong. He might have zero morals, you're the one that's worked in close contact with him not me, but it's entirely possible to have a strong moral compass and ethical framework and not care for IP at all.

In the same way it's possible to have strong ethics and yet be comfortable with "honor killings."

In the sense that moral relativism is a thing yes. A big difference being acceptance within modern western culture. I'd assume (hope) there is a minuscule amount of people for honor killings while it appears to me quite common to not give two hoots about IP outside of fear of legal consequences.

We must hang out with different folks. Everyone I know thinks that an author deserves payment for their work if they wish.

litigation is a civil complaint not a criminal one. nobody goes to jail for that.

you may have some justified reasons for disliking him but you sound unhinged in this comment. get a grip.

Well said!

The current litigation is civil, however, he or uber could be potentially criminally liable as well...

If just a portion of what is claimed comes out as true there will be a criminal case as well. This sounds orders of magnitude more serious than what Sergey Aleynikov was claimed to have done to Goldman Sachs and he is about ready to be put in jail.

Sergey didn't have an equally large gorilla of a company backing him up...

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