Uber and Waymo Reach Settlement
uber.com
uber.com
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16993208/waymo-v-uber-tria...
Summary - Waymo was claiming Uber violated 8 trade secrets (down from 100s), and had only directly discussed these trade secrets for 45 minutes over the past week. "Can you really explain eight self-driving car trade secrets in 45 minutes?"
"And then there’s the part where Anthony Levandowski is not on trial, Uber is. Even if Levandowski took 14,000 confidential documents, that doesn’t mean that Uber did something wrong — there isn’t a clear link to how those documents got onto Uber computers or were used in Uber self-driving cars."
Alphabet had already won the PR war. They had alot to gain by grinding Uber into the dirt. Now Alphabet comes off looking like a paper tiger for a settlement that requires Uber to do very well to have any value. Let's not forget they are a major shareholder in Lyft. I can imagine that Larry Page must not be very happy right now.
The value of the settlement for Alphabet is not in the stock, it is in the “agreement to ensure that any Waymo confidential information is not being incorporated in Uber Advanced Technologies Group hardware and software.”
Of course, the details of that aren't going to be shared, but that's the thing matters.
> Let's not forget they are a major shareholder in Lyft.
Are they? I know GV has a significant stake in Uber, and Waymo has a cooperative deal with Lyft, but I don't recall Alphabet or any of it's subsidiaries holding a big share of Lyft.
Edit: as pointed out in the response, Alphabet is invested in Lyft through CapitalG.
I mean this is better than a patent because a trade secret will never expire in perpetuity, right? I also imagine this extends to anyone acting on Uber's behalf?
So how is this not a win for Waymo?
The next Levandowski will think twice before following in this one's footsteps - even if their actions would be 100% legal. The next Kalanick will think twice before hiring him.
So having extensive monitoring on work machines is not because you don't trust your employees --- but because you don't trust that the employee's laptop / mobile device is always going to be under the control of the employee. And if it does get compromised, you want to be able to state with confidence how much data might have gotten compromised, or how much access the criminal or state sponsored attacker might have been able to gain access to.
The fact that it can also be used to find incriminating evidence for back-stabbing employees who are intent on screwing over their employer is just a bonus.
And if he wasn't smart enouh to realize this, I wonder how much Waymo lost and how much Uber gained when they lured him away from Waymo. :-)
> a settlement that requires Uber to do very well to have any value.
Waymo/Google counsel earned their annual bonus.
> You're not allowed to use other people's trade secrets anyway.
Being allowed to do something and actually doing something are two very different things.
What does this mean in a practical sense? rm -rf /car? Can the Uber engineers who worked on this continue to do so, or are they "tainted"?
That isn't true. Uber didn't use any trade secrets from waymo, thats why waymo settled. The point of the oversite is to continue to show that uber isn't using their trade secrets. There is no part of the uber tech stack that needs to be retired as an outcome of this case.
Waymo has plenty of motivation to settle if they could get adequate behavioral commitments in the settlement, even if they thought Uber had and had used Waymo trade secrets. We don't know here details of the behavioral commitments around preventing use of Waymo technology, but their existence was in the public release.
Given that, if Waymo wins the self-driving race, Uber is a likely customer and is a company Alphabet already owns a nice chunk of through GV, there is plenty of incentive to minimize cost to Uber as well as Waymo while mitigating any risk of Uber using Waymo tech. Dragging out the court process isn't in anyone's interest, whether or not Uber stole and used Waymo technology.
> Uber didn't use any trade secrets from waymo, thats why waymo settled.
This is still unclear.
> There is no part of the uber tech stack that needs to be retired as an outcome of this case.
Honestly, no one knows for sure, everything here (including my statements) is pure conjecture. Here's the reality though - Uber did not explicitly say "we absolutely 100% did not steal trade secrets". Outside the court of law, that tells me they are going to lose something of value...to what extent, I guess only Uber knows.
Not really. The settlement is an indication that someone did an ROI calculation and decided that .043% of Uber is cheaper than the cost of seeing the trial to conclusion with the possibility of losing.
If this statement is indeed true and Uber isn't totally brazen, then yes it would imply that Uber is going to have to seriously clamp down on how it uses the data/IP they got from Otto (which clearly they got from Google/Waymo). Not a lawyer, but that's how I read it.
Sure you are, you're just not allowed to reveal them. That is, once they're revealed [to outsiders], they can be used by anybody. The only cause of action that I know of is to go after the revealer (as we have here), nobody who learns (and/or uses) anything from a disclosure of trade secrets has anything to worry about.
Put if you steal the recipe to Coke and email it to Pepsi, they can't use it, even if use doesn't disclose it.
It depends on how you learn the a trade secret.
2. Isn't that exactly what this settlement is intending to do? It sets the legal precedence for "don't skirt this one, we're serious about it".
You don't toss someone a few hundred million dollars because your case is 'flimsy', and 'winning or losing' in court is too simplistic an analysis of the impact of the lawsuit on both sides as well as their third party competitors.
The Jeong article reads like someone read Uber's submissions to the court, phrased them in common vernacular, then ignored everything that didn't fit their narrative.
If Uber was in any real jeopardy of being found liable here they would have settled for far more. We know this because if Uber lost the case outright they would face an injunction against their self-driving business that would probably force them to license Waymo tech or put an end to the whole endeavor. Uber ATG is worth a lot more than what they paid in equity, and this is not an amount that matters at all to Google. The dollar figure is just there so Google can say they didn't come away with nothing.
The settlement wasn't just for money, it also barred Uber from use of some of the disputed trade secrets/technology, which could be valuable for Google. Given that Uber hasn't monetized the technology yet, it would be hard to prove any damages. The outcome of a trial could have been a similar amount and an injunction and still been a big win for Google if the future self driving market is really going to be big and if the covered technology really was crucial.
What did they get? Unjust Enrichment sized damages and mutually agreed forbearance equivalent to injunctive relief.
And that's before we get into discussing how much of a minefield discovery was becoming in the case.
2) Because prior to the trial there would have been a flurry of discovery related motions, a large amount of time pulling engineers off their jobs to have them perform witness prep at both companies, then a large period of pre-trial legal prep, then the trial itself.
At all stages, information is leaking, and expenses are going up.
... And then the appeals start.
... Then the partial re-trials and appeals on those.
Settlement is the most common way civil litigation disputes are resolved. Trials are the anomaly.
In this case, both parties likely recognized that getting into a knife fight about documentary production in a high-stakes race-to-market matter was likely in Cruise's favor, not theirs.
Was this by their own will? Back in the Oracle v Google trial, which had the same judge, he asked Oracle to cut down the 132 claims to only 3 - which Oracle was not happy about.
What was supposed to be the original slam dunk for Waymo, 'trade secret 96', Which referred to PCB circuit diagrams that were accidently emailed to Waymo instead of Uber ATG by a shared supplier, was even dropped. Waymo's whole case was pretty flimsy.
Possibly because the patents were invalid due to the existence of prior art? Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15875685
According to the article, the infringement claims were dropped after Waymo was notified of the USPTO reexamination that was going to be done due to Swildens filing the ex parte reexamination request.
>...So he took the unusual step of challenging the 936 patent himself, filing what is called an ex-parte reexamination request. He gathered the prior art he had discovered, completed reams of paperwork, and pulled together his detailed arguments into a 101-page document that he filed with the USPTO on August 1.
Waymo dropped the claims relating to the 936 patent on Sep 13.
>...Swildens, naturally, thinks his reexamination request played a role. He notes that USPTO had a phone interview with Waymo’s lawyers a few days before, on September 8, at which the examiners presumably told Waymo that a reexamination of the 936 would be going ahead. If the reexamination started while the patent was being actively litigated, Uber and the court would have to be informed.
https://www.wired.com/story/eric-swildens-uber-waymo-lawsuit...
there isn’t a clear link to how those documents got onto Uber computers
> Can you really explain eight self-driving car trade secrets in 45 minutes?
Maybe I'm fooling myself, but I think I can do that in 45 seconds.
- hey what's your learning rate scheduling for module X?
- we use an EMA with coefficient 1e-4
- oh great, and for Y, do you do constant strides?
- no we use backtracking to figure out some sampling heuristic
Nah, people who support nullification based on perception of the specific case and offender circumstances are not generally less logical and articulate than others.
You obviously want to eliminate people who either see the law as inherently just or see it as important to uphold the law even when the result would be unjust, as well as people inclined to see punishing your client as just despite the circumstances. But there's no reason, in general, to think that logical thinking or articulateness are, in general, going to be good correlated for those moral inclinations.
The point is that smart people are not always dismissed. Different legal strategies work better with different jury selections.
Lawyers don't “always try to dismiss smart people from juries”, or even try to identify smart people.
They do try to remove people that they expect will be more likely than average to be unfavorably inclined to their client or specific arguments, or that they expect to be a wildcard because they will be unable to restrict themselves to the courtroom presentation.
Neither of those, in general, is particularly correlated with intelligence.
Also use LBFG so you never worry about learning rate.
Literally never happens in practice.
If self-driving car ML is "data scientists replacing a driver with computers", architecture search is computers replacing data scientists. $1.2M is roughly 3-4 data scientists' annual compensations at a company like Google or Uber.
Finding hyperparameters for an existing architecture is much easier because you would typically deal with a much lower cardinality in hyperparameter space. SigOpt is helping with that. Google has an internal solution that is able to take advantage of parameters within their job scheduling infrastructure (they actually have a bunch of them, the one I'm talking about is called hyperband [0]). CERN, as far as I know, was using hyperopt [1]. Avant uses an open-source version of SigOpt that we wrote in 2016 called loop [2].
[0] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.06560.pdf [1] - http://hyperopt.github.io/hyperopt [2] - https://github.com/avantoss/loop
I dont understand it, but I want to.
It's worth it
- the former felt this was the "best" it could get in such a situation as their case was not as strong as they initially thought
- the latter was not keen on having its image dragged into the mud any further and may also be aware that more incriminating material could surface if Google or others dug further?
IANAL, but I find the resolution of this case quite puzzling... Also what does it mean for Uber's self-driving car development efforts?
And to my thinking Waymo had lots more to lose than Uber did. (and I think that is reflected in the settlement being not quite 13% of what they were asking, and in stock which may be completely worthless). Waymo loses and it might embolden other Google employees to go to competitors, it might embolden those competitors to try to recruit their top engineers to bring their ideas into the competitor. It might completely blunt Googles ability to get any engineer to believe what the company thinks of as trade secrets would actually be considered trade secrets in a court and so they aren't as threatening as before. And on cross examination Uber might have pulled some things into open court and the public record that Waymo would rather not have out there.
Uber on the other hand already has a reputation as being a rule breaker, and skating over the line. So what do they have to lose? I Waymo can take $1.9 billion in cash out of Uber (maybe more if they can get lawyers fees etc) they can take them off the board completely.
According to the coverage they were being berated by the judge and their case had gone from being about patents to about trade secrets to about 8 trade secrets. That is not a legal case gaining steam, that is one that is trying to stay alive.
Kalanick and Levandowski are already gone, their's and Uber's reputation has been soiled from this, and I'm pretty sure all the bad PR stopped Uber's valuation from skyrocketing even more.
I'm not sure how Waymo losing would make it less threatening for people to do the same thing? They now know more than ever that anything they do to internal/confidential data is being monitored.
So change your name, move to a different area, change your hair style and voila, playboy at large.
Waymo's trade secret violation case was flimsy so they were willing to settle, and Uber from the beginning has been looking for the quickest way out.
Even if Uber could have won the case, their reputation is now such that if you see Uber in a headline, you are primed to think "scandal" or "evil" - even if you see "Uber wins Waymo case" you'll think "wow I wonder what shady stuff Uber did to pull that one off against Google".
I'm interested to see if Waymo pursues anything directly against Levandowski.
(I mean, this is the company that remotely wipes machines to avoid complying with search warrants, under a CEO that appears to think that the ends justify any means...)
They can't, because they agreed to binding arbitration. The Feds can pursue him criminally.
I am not a lawyer.
I am very hesitant to use Uber because of their other ethically questionable tactics. This whole suit was furthering the notion that Uber has no limits to their desire to be number 1 - regardless of who they exploit or harm on the way.
No company that aims to be taken seriously wants to be involved in a circus like that.
Waymo joins Tesla and Baidu as self driving car companies who have levied lawsuits over top engineers leaving their projects to become competition.
It doesn't seem like anything changes. This just looks like a large waste of time and money.
Considering there are no direct damages as Uber never actually got anywhere with self driving cars that seems incredibly high.
> So Alphabet might own a lot more of Uber once it's Ipo
Huh? Your position of ownership doesn't magically go up once you IPO, it normally only goes down (you get diluted or you liquidate your position).
Really, if it was an open and shut case Uber could have gotten it dismissed. The fact they figured giving up 1/4 a billion dollars was better than continuing to fight says a lot more about their situation than any internet commentators can. The only reason for them to spend that money is because they was a significant chance aka well over 25% they would have lost significantly more by fighting.
I think it's impossible for general purpose roads. Not without true AI.
0.34 * 0.01 * $48B = $0.163BWho knows, perhaps that may end up being the most accurate value..
This happened with multiple other companies like Facebook and AirBnB, so I don't see why in the case of Uber that anyone who is informed can conclude that it was a down round.
I have no idea what kinds of damages Waymo might have been able to extract from Uber, but it seems very unlikely that it would have been in the multi-billion-dollar range. $245 million is a huge sum, add to that the saved cost of ongoing litigation.
Not sure what you were trying to say?
This was a fight they could have drawn out. They could have claimed it wasn't their fault, they could have paid enough legal fees to win the day. But it was always going to be a waste of time, in a literal sense. Years could have gone by before any decision, holding back Uber the entire time.
Uber is still a black hole for money but VCs see it's potential and keep throwing money at it. So long as that money kept coming, Uber could do anything they want really.
But then the market started crashing. The last week has been a wake up call that things are a-changin'. In another six months, there may not be VC money being thrown around anymore. And then you'd have Uber actually in a crunch. What then?
By settling today, Uber may have the time it needs to get their self-driving fleet in the road before the money runs out for good. That's all that matters to keep the company alive, and Khosrowshahi knows it.
But if he'd been smart, he'd have settled six months ago instead.
It's fine to disagree, but don't just tell me I'm wrong, convince me I'm wrong!
An economy getting hot leads to higher interest rates which makes stocks less tempting due to risk-free alternatives getting better. So it's very easy to have scenarios where stock market declines are occurring while the the economy is doing very well. That's what appears to be happening now, there are no economic indicators that show the economy is faltering at all.
In the meantime, the lawsuit helped kick Kalanick out, and he was replaced by someone much more reasonable who wanted to end the lawsuit. As a consequence the two parties were able to come to an agreement.
They are mostly in agreement that Google had enough to win the case but that they likely had the worry that juries are always unpredictable and you really never know what will happen. They seem to believe that the thing that Google cared about the most was restricting Uber's usage of the stolen technology. They believe that Uber felt they had a decent chance of losing so they mutually agreed to setting, giving Google what they wanted (restriction of the technology usage). Once that was offered Google immediately moved to settle since that was what they wanted from the outset and any additional cash or destruction of Uber's image would have been beyond their needs.
The reason I say they didn't use it is if they had, then it would still be there in Uber's technology, and it would be easy for Waymo to prove that in court, and so they would have had no motive for settling.
The other possibility is that it was never planned to be an IP theft. Maybe Uber payed so much just because it was desperate to hire Levandowski.
But then the question is why Levandowski copied the files. His explanation that it was to guarantee he got his bonus doesn't make much sense, and so it seems pretty sure he invented it after the fact when he got caught. But maybe he was just being irrational at the time and that really was his reason, or maybe he had some other odd reason for doing it. I mean, it is pretty clear he is a person with, shall we say, "non-standard" ways of thinking about things.
I wonder if we will ever learn what the true story was.
Time is a motive for settling, as is the fact that even with the best case juries are unpredictable.
The money at issue probably isn't a big deal to Alphabet, the behavioral consequences are. If what they've got in the settlement on that front is, in their view, adequate to ensure that their technology isn't going to be used to compete against them, getting that now is probably better than going through the legal process and getting to a judgement.
I think it's safe to say this wasn't really about theft of trade secrets by Uber. We can infer this because Google's lawyers would have known exactly how weak their case against Uber was when nothing of substance turned up as part of discovery. Google decided to go to trial anyway. They knew that Uber's ailing brand would make them _seem_ guilty in the public eye even though they clearly weren't.
I can't prove this, but I think this was a chillingly opportunistic move by Google that was designed mainly to stop the loss of top engineering talent to Uber ATG. After all, who would want to go to join a company which appeared to be in serious legal jeopardy?
I'd speculate that Uber's current leadership saw an opportunity to immediately stop the damage to their brand and took it. Part of me wishes TK were still running the show because he probably would not have settled.
I feel like there's a contradiction inside this sentence.
Is this an admission that some of Uber's technology came from Waymo, but merely things that are not trade secrets / proprietary information?
Got sued a lot of times myself for various (business related) reasons. Sometimes just faster to pay than see how it plays out.
Seems like he got a pretty good deal if so, he's retired with hundreds of millions.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/29/waymo-pursued-arbitration-...
> “Waymo asserts no claims for trade secret misappropriation in those arbitrations."
That article describes the arbitration being about poaching/non-compete agreement violations.
If they didn't raise the trade secret theft allegations, are they allowed to come back for another try? Or did they miss their opportunity?
I could be wrong, of course, but I doubt arbitration left open a lot of space for future action. Without the arbitration being unsealed, though, I have no way of knowing.
Of course, the US DoJ and/or California equivalents can still pursue criminal charges against Levandowski.
"Hard questions" -- That's a good one! Not only because of its velvety-smooth use of euphemism, but because it's basically true: We enlist the help of the judicial system to answer questions that are hard. And an accusation that the accused denies, fits in that category. Filing a lawsuit is essentially asking a "hard question" along the lines of "Should the other party be obligated to compensate us for damages?" One side says yes, the other says no. Hard question!
I'll have to use that one sometime. I really need to learn the art of executive-speak if I'm to advance in this life. But I suspect I'll just stubbornly stay my same tactless self.
This kind of language must be intentional given the team that reviewed and edited the memo, which makes it worse to my ears. Either "may have" or "potentially" would have sufficed.
I don't see how this lawsuit benefits google shareholders as a whole. They just wasted money on lawyers.
Also, I'm not clear how much he actually netted from Otto, since lots was probably based on vesting that didn't happen.
If not, he's {probably} off the hook.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-uber-lawsuit/exc...
First off as others have pointed out Waymo's case wasn't a slam dunk. So they settled for way less than they originally wanted.
But there are several other interesting things to note. Because of this case there is now a criminal investigation into Uber's acquisition of Otto. I feel like part of why Uber settled was because they knew this was being investigated and dragging out this case in court may have made public some really incriminating evidence in the criminal investigation.
What further leads me to believe this is the case is the fact that the current CEO has basically admitted that the acquisition of Otto should have been handled differently. It seems like they knew that Otto may have stolen trade secrets from Waymo. It also appears that Uber may have had helped set up Otto from the start to acquire such information. For this we will have to wait and see how the criminal investigation shakes out. At which point we could see federal charges appear against Uber and Levandowski. We may also see the SEC step into this as well if they did appear to set up Otto as a Shell company to acquire stolen technologies. Time will tell.
A small sign of that: I generally order Ubers from Google Maps. Until recently, I was sent to Uber app; lately, it’s an entire experience through GMaps. I suspect they are planning to switch that default to Waymo wherever they are.
I prefer GM because it has all my bookmarks, it doesn't download the same map tiles again, etc. Until recently, it was quite annoying, because you were trapped in "Uber mode" during a ride. As of a few months ago, you can go back to the base map, start new searches, look up transit directions, etc. and later return to your ride's status.
That does mean that Google Maps will win and its default option too. I suspect that the way they display services, notably prices and availability will have a dramatic impact too: at the moment, it’s a band. It’s all too easy to show a cheap low price for instance and I suspect that Google Maps might want to argue that they should review estimates and compare them to actual charges to enforce consistent labelling. Same for availability: you can say a car will be there in three minutes, but have that change to five once you clic, etc.
Overall, it does look like an anti-trust issue. I guess, in that case, a China-Wall between Google Maps and Waymo, transparent ranking process, etc. would be necessary. I can’t imagine not having access to either a mapping service, or the convenience of comparing public transport with ride-hailing.
I’ve been an advocate for auditing a lot of algorithms by publicly-appointed experts for a while now. You need a good understanding of machine learning to audit the political impacts of Facebook News Feed and the Call to Vote button, for instance. Not all countries can appoint their expert though, so we might need to have smaller countries agree to trust the expert from larger nation groups.
If you're asking whether you can ask maps to switch into the Uber app, I'm not sure there is a lot of value (you can pop open the app and your ride appears there too). Uber exposed developer APIs presumedly for this reason. Embedding the UX lowers friction and tightens up the user funnel.
At what point do statements like this start to harm a company rather than benefit it? It is plain to see that they are lying; if the first is true the second part would not be happening.
As part of the settlement, Uber will pay Waymo 0.34% of Uber equity, valued at Series G-1 round at an approximate $US72B valuation.
Uber’s CEO also “expressed regret for the actions” that led to the lawsuit.
This could mean Waymo will probably not be able to announce anything significant until then: Uber would suffer from having such a big rival step up. Internal politics at Alphabet must be fun.
It doesn't mean Alphabet thinks the stock won't lose value, it means that they think that it won't lose enough value to be worth less than what they could have gotten in cash, either in a settlement or (discounted for risk and time, and netted against the expense of continuing) from taking the lawsuit to it's conclusion.
> This could mean Waymo will probably not be able to announce anything significant until then: Uber would suffer from having such a big rival step up.
Is $245 million really worth any significant risk to Alphabet’s position in self-driving cars? I suspect they’d accept the risk to the value of the Uber stock to maximize their own future prospects in that market.
They've already got a business that's spinning off tons of cash, so they have no need for money, and instead, are pursuing any possible avenue that has the potential of making $$$ (e.g. all of the other bets).
Presumably it's possible there are settlement terms having to do with the use/disuse of certain trade secrets, but we may never know.
Maybe the reason Google hasn’t been suing much until now is that they’ve largely been on the borrowing end of the deal (cf. Android’s debt to Sun and Apple).
Levandowski was fired from Uber, is still in arbitration with Waymo, and possibly has a federal investigation pending against him (which is why he has, and was planning to, take the fifth amendment). I'm not sure how it "paid off" here.
I don’t think Dara is an angel, far from it — I got internal rumours that he’s more than willing to punish good people if that makes him look tough and, honestly, he needs to. Rather than let him cull randomly until he feels like he’s done enough, we could help him pick the bad:
Were would you expect them to lead? Serious question: I know many employees read HN, and I’m happy to point some of the more respectful and change-prone ones to your suggestions.
Waymo will have access to Ubers Lidar and software.
And an admission of guilt.
http://ideas.4brad.com/uber-and-waymo-settle-lawsuit-giant-v...
The future the Earth needs is only delayed by these moats of who-can-use-which-research.
You don’t own your discoveries or ideas, any more than you can own a song that you sing to another person. The moment something leaves your head, that information is no longer yours—it enriches the whole world, and that is how it should be.
I am the staunchest defender of property rights—but information can never be property.
Property is an artificial construct, it's up to society how we define what property is and how laws protect it. In this case, Google and Waymo are literally building fake cities to create this IP. That money needs to come from somewhere or that research won't happen, and a temporary monopoly on the IP it generates seems like a fair trade-off for society.
Intellectual Property, however, is made-up fairytale nonsense.
Society should give (or "lend", in the case of a patent) a public good to a private entity if and only if the societal benefit outweighs the societal loss of giving out the good. Maybe your argument was shorthand for something along those lines, but I think it's important to distinguish.
What is the incentive for companies to spend their resources trying to find a solution for this if society can effectively nationalize the results as soon as they are obtained? If a company cannot recoup their investment (and their risk) then they're not going to spend the resources in the first place.
It's far better for public institutions to have well funded research programs for "IP" that serves the public good. If companies get there first, by all means "lend" them the patent (as long as the "loan" expires after a reasonable period of time.) This is largely the system that we have today, and while not perfect in many respects it does ensure that both public and private entities are chasing big goals.
> reason a company gets a
> public good, right? If I
> want to own a city park,
> and I spend a bunch of money
> trying to own it, that
> doesn't mean I do, in fact,
> own it or should own it.
Isn't the error here assuming that the IP invented by the private entity is automatically a public good?
To me a public park is not equal to IP invented with private funds.
Deep research requires investment or public funding. If you can get congress to fund it, then more power to you - but until then, people have to make a living from invention.