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Comment by nojito | Hacker News Reader

Both parties will just settle.

Apple already caught former employees accessing the Apple internal network with unreturned laptops after termination that’s pretty much game over.

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Why would Apple settle? They probably want the same outcomes of the Waymo v Uber trial that forced Uber out of the market. Apple's accusations imply that every part of OpenAI's hardware effort has been tainted with Apple's trade secrets and is therefore illegitimate. They also have more money than God so they can keep the suit going as long as they want.

Uber was not forced to leave the self driving car market by Waymo's litigation. The litigation ended in February 2018 and Uber left the market in December 2020.

I think it’s fair to argue that Uber’s self-driving efforts never recovered after that trial.

Pretty sure it was the crash (same story with Cruise for that matter)

Cause and effect can be delayed.

This is an interesting point here. Due to having infinite money already, that's a possible dynamic we might see. OAI admits "Yup, obviously you got us. Let's write a check." And Apple might just respond "Nah, we are obviously going to win at trial, the legal fees don't bother us a bit, and honestly we don't really need the money, we'd rather destroy you as heavily as possible, for some combination of making an example out of all the criminals involved, plus there's a tiny chance you could threaten us someday considering you hired 'our boy' Jony Ive to build hardware."

There's also just the possibility that the use of stolen IP has contaminated most work within OpenAI to the point that an injunction could realistically stop all deployments by OpenAI and grind the company to a halt during discovery, before a trial even happens if Apple is granted the injunction.

If Apple has receipts, this could spell the end of OpenAI anyway. Even if Apple doesn't go to trial, at minimum, OpenAI will need to discard any work that even remotely touched or was influenced by Apple's IP here. If it was shared broadly within OpenAI across multiple projects, it could be quite substantial. Fruit of a poisonous tree and all that.

They will just settle if a settlement gets them what they want for less than fighting this to legal completion would cost them (on a risk-adjusted basis).

People are forgetting that the kind of conduct alleged is also likely illegal.

In the not-so-distant past, Uber's head of self-driving was indicted and sentenced to jail time for similar conduct. The criminal case didn't start until ~2.5 years after the civil case was filed.

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