Waymo vs. Uber: unsealed court documents reveal damning evidence
theverge.com
theverge.com
Here, the story takes a bizarre twist. The investigators visited the shredding facility twice in an effort to confirm Levandowski’s story, but when they showed Levandowski’s picture to employees, no one recognized him.
Levandowski also claimed that he had paid in cash and had not received a receipt. But the shredding facility told investigators that “all destructions are recorded on a triplicate, carbon-copy receipt” with details about date, time, service and payment. Although investigators did find a record of five disks being destroyed and paid for in cash, the shredding happened on an entirely different day in March, and the signature was “illegible.”
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/uber-trav...
But it doesn't appear to offer any good evidence that Google's trade secrets made it to Uber. Which is what actual "damning evidence" would be.
I don't see anything in the report which provides even strong suggestions that Uber received material from Google. I mean, I don't think that the report rules it out, either. But at most, it kind of hints that Levandowski was the kind of guy who might have tried to get the data over to Uber. Which we basically already knew. That's certainly not damning evidence.
I bet that Uber's lawyers will point to some of the clown car antics documented in this report and say, "Come on, if these guys actually had moved trade secrets over to Uber, obviously they would have left material evidence that they did so. Clearly they were not great at covering up their actions."
That said, apparently you do not need to know anything about file systems to pass a Google interview.
If Uber/Otto are shown to have done incredibly weird/questionable stuff but Google/Waymo can’t show any of the information was used would Uber/Otto still be liable for anything?
One of the ways a suit can be dismissed is if the judge determines that even if all of your side's evidence is accepted purely on its face, the result is not evidence of an actionable case. This is exactly to prevent it from being the case that you can get in front of a jury and say, "Well, I don't actually have evidence for my case, but look what a terrible person the respondent is," and making an appeal to emotion.
Of course, this is all human judgment, lines are fuzzy, and you can't predict any given case. But it's supposed to be that you have to show preponderance of evidence of something that is a valid reason to sue, not, like, preponderance of evidence that the respondent is a slimeball and it seems plausible that his character is such that he might have done something that you have no evidence of.
You have to decide what the most plausible version of events is given the preponderance of the evidence. You have to use what you can see to decide the most likely scenario that you can't see. All this deleting end hiding things is evidence of bad acts, it speaks to the behavior and intent of the people in question, and it's entirely and thoroughly inconsistent with the actions of someone who was behaving ethically.
People talk about circumstantial evidence like it's a "gotcha" that means there's no real evidence. That's a common fallacy. Circumstantial evidence is evidence. And activity consistent with a cover up is in fact evidence that supports allegations of underlying bad behavior.
The legal system isn't a computer program, it uses people and their judgement and intuition about human behavior to figure things out. That's by design.
“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain
IMHO that is why Uber stonewalled Waymo for as long as possible on this evidence and worked so hard to give Waymo as little time as possible for depositions. This is also why Waymo is looking for relief (e.g. delay) from the courts. IANAL, but I expect the judge will be sympathetic to Waymo's requests given how egregious Uber's behavior was.