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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Waymo is further granted the right to pull down the defendants' pants, and point and laugh at their genitals.

I mean, seriously, they've just been granted a shit load of access to their biggest competitors secrets. Pray they don't abuse that...

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Doesn't work that way. When they say "Waymo", they really mean "Waymo's attorney's and hired independent expert(s)". The attorney's get to see the stuff as "Attorney's Eyes Only" (AEO) and then report back summaries to their clients. They have an ethical obligation not to disclose the full details.

Excellent point. My "pants down" joke, however, shall remain!

Can you explain the joke?

Your comment was unexpected, and that actually made it fun. There's a theory about humor that it exists to expose wrong assumptions in a harmless way.

The lawyer can pull down the defendants' pants and point and laugh, then tell Waymo how funny it was.

More: It's usually only outside counsel who gets to see that kind of stuff. Even corporate attorneys don't.

If Uber turns out to be innocent as they claim, can they then turn around and sue Waymo? The amount of information Waymo has gotten on a competitor through discovery seems highly prejudicial.

The lawsuit isn't really about protecting trade secrets for some soon-to-be-obsolete lidar technology, that's just a convenient tool for punishing Levandowski and Uber for hatching this scheme.

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