> "That the most important witness in the case [Levandowski], somehow his own files got overlooked. That's very suspicious."
Is he not implicating Uber in that, or at the very least Uber's legal counsel?
Like, if Uber had a prototype that was clearly very closely related to Google's prototype, then it would be very hard for Uber to credibly suggest that the similarities are just coincidence, that there was parallel evolution or something. But without a link to something that Uber actually produced or used, what Google has is an iron-clad case that Levandowski took their IP and acted like a douchebag, and an iron-clad case that Uber was at least retroactively aware of that, and very little case that Uber took their technology.
My reading of the article was that they'd dropped patents from the case entirely, but that quote might have been misleading.
> "That the most important witness in the case [Levandowski], somehow his own files got overlooked. That's very suspicious."
I think the judge was specifically referring to this fact:
> Uber also said, just this weekend, that it found that Levandowski's e-mails from his startup, Otto Trucking, hadn't been properly migrated to Uber and weren't produced.
So I read it as he's raising the Vulcan eyebrow at Uber for that.
And he's even more directly telling Uber's lead attorney in the case that he (Alsup) doesn't care what consequences he (the attorney) gets for playing stupid (and unethical) hide-the-document games during discovery, because those consequences are his own fault.
Uber's behavior in this case has been one of three things: behavior of those who don't think the rules apply to them, behavior of those who are unaware of how badly the court can hurt them, or behavior of those who have something that they are desperate to hide.
If there really was patent infringement, then it would be difficult to erase all traces. Similar to the Zenimax Oculus lawsuit where computers were erased, but the verdict still came down against Oculus.
Civil case. Preponderance of evidence is enough. And the defense standing over a shredder pushing stolen documents through, paying for the shredding of a hard drive in cash months after it was supposed to be done, delaying discovery and magically disappearing a boatload of files from a company already known publicly to act scummy looks a fucking lot like a preponderance of evidence. All Waymo needs to do is tell the story the way they see it to a jury - too many dots connect up perfectly.
My guess is that the only reason this case is still going is that Uber can't come up with settlement terms (i.e. billions of dollars of cash) Waymo will accept.
If I invent something and Patent it, you can independently invent it and you're still infringing on my Patent.
Provenance is only important for Copyright and Trade Secrets.
(I think. IANAL.)
There are bad taxi laws out there, but the number of good taxi laws is not negligible.
"Waymo alleged that Uber had stolen its trade secrets and had been violating four patents. Waymo had people signing, under oath, statements about how they could tell the patents had been violated. It's now turned out that the patent claims have completely vanished. They've been dropped. The expert you had was way out of bounds. There was no patent infringement. I think when Waymo got into this case, it thought it was going to go into the files and find an exact duplicate of the Waymo files. As it turns out, the product is dissimilar in a lot of ways. It may even be a vast improvement over what was going on Waymo. So they've come up short there."