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Comment by mmanfrin | Hacker News Reader

Title feels a little clickbaity, as it was a request from the Judge prior to going to a Jury:

  U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco has asked 
  Waymo to narrow its more than 100 trade secrets claims to 
  fewer than 10 to put in front of a jury.

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Uber's response to it is even more baffling!

"Waymo’s retreat on three of their four patent claims is yet another sign that they have overpromised and can’t deliver," Uber said in a statement. "Not only have they uncovered zero evidence of any of the 14,000 files in question coming to Uber, they now admit that Uber’s LiDAR design is actually very different than theirs. Faced with this hard truth, Waymo has resorted to floating conspiracy theories not rooted in fact, doing everything they can to put the focus on sensation rather than substance."

Is it baffling? They're doing what they can to influence the public (and jury, as impartial as they will try to make it).

It is baffling because it does a poor job at influencing. Frankly it sounds kinda unprofessional and "Uberish".

I think it's because you know significantly more about the legal battle than the average person. Now, a jury may not be convinced by this stunt, that I'll give.

Uber's legal team has done this a couple times recently - really strong tones for things.

Both legal teams have done it. It's what lawyers do, especially in a case playing out so publicly.

What is "it", and could you give an example of Google's legal team doing "it?"

Here's an articles that cites statements where they are both doing "it":

https://www.recode.net/2017/6/28/15891136/alphabet-alleges-u...

"It" are allegations and statements that very liberally interpret convenient facts, ignore inconvenient facts and inject conjecture to support the narrative they want the public to believe. I'm shocked that anyone would think lawyers for only one side would do that. It's all heresay, allegations, conjecture and bullshit by lawyers all sides until evidence is presented in a court of law and a judgement has been made. And even then the judgement may be wrong for all sorts of reasons.

FWIW, Recode is one of the few places covering the case fairly equitably (probably because it's run by one of the few journalists in Silicon Valley with any scruples and minimal conflicts of interest, Kara Swisher).

I'm surprised to hear Kara Swisher described like that. I feel like most of her writing is near tabloid gossip quality, and she seems to have an unhealthy obsession with trashing Yahoo/Marissa Mayer. I did work there for a while, so I'm certainly biased, but I've never seen a journalist so intent on badmouthing a single company/CEO with such wild speculation and over-dramatized commentary. She did seem to have a good source so maybe she was milking that but it went way beyond reporting the facts.

She's certainly not perfect. She obviously has her own biases, but they seem more personal and certainly aren't blatant conflicts of interest like most of the other tech journalists that have taken money from VCs do. Many of the others do not bite the hands that feed them. They make sure to cover investments of their investors positively and competitors of the investments of their investors negatively. It's all so horribly incestuous.

Kara Swisher's main career was been publishing leaked Silicon Valley documents (including Google's) while being married to a Google Vice President. (They are now separated and the VP is no longer at Google)

Many said similar things about Trump's rhetoric a year ago, yet here we are.

It could be Trump rhetoric, if it were a little less coherent and drew from a smaller vocabulary.

I might have agreed that this type of rhetoric does a poor job at influencing about a year ago. Unfortunately, as this past US presidential election has show, it seems to be pretty effective.

Yes because this kind of rhetoric was never used effectively before /s

I just didn't have a glaring example of its effectiveness to point to before :/.

They understand most people aren't paying attention.

mmanfrin quotes a bit about trade secret claims. You're quoting something about patent claims. That should help de-baffle it.

No harshness intended. This is complicated stuff, no sarcasm.

This is straight up Donald Trump.

Reformatted for mobile users:

U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco has asked Waymo to narrow its more than 100 trade secrets claims to fewer than 10 to put in front of a jury.

@dang/HN team: Considering how often snippets are used on HN, is there another way to format those on mobile?

Thanks for all you do!

The solution is for users to not use monospaced, pre-formatted text for things other than code snippets.

I think monospaced should be like

``` monospaced ```

And the four-space/tab indentation should denote

    a quote

But that's just me.

I'm a fan of > for quotes, plus it's less likely to have people used to four spaces for code suddenly getting quotes instead

If users have to work around server errors, it's not a solution.

It's not a server error, it's a user error. Stop using monospace for things that don't need it.

The relevant quote from the judge is:

    I want to reiterate to the plaintiff here that you should think a lot
    about just dropping the patent part of this case.

My understanding is that there are two parts to this suit: patent infringement and trade secrets. You can't patent a trade secret (then it wouldn't be secret), so these are two independent things.

Alsup was suggesting Waymo to drop the patent portion of their suit and focus solely on the trade secret portion of their case. The trade secrets were pared down as mentioned in that snippet, but that's in addition to dropping 3 of the 4 patent infringement claims.

totally. My first thoughts while reading the title was "oh now that's a 90 degree turn, patents are bogus". Turn out the title is... oh well, this is kind of a fake news, it's everywhere, even on HN. What a wonderful world

edit: the title has been edited since.

Note that the reason he told them to drop the trade secret claims is because they're kind of ridiculous:

> the judge scolded Waymo for being "overbroad" in what it says are 121 trade secrets involved in the case. For example, Alsup wrote that Waymo can't claim that the way it positions light sources in its Lidar is protected, since the design uses well-known principles of physics.

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