Hacker News Reader

Comment by sjbase | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, however he's also suggesting that said evidence is missing under very suspicious circumstances:

> "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?

View on HN

My read is that all of this bad behavior on the part of Levandowski (and Kalanick) and so forth will be extremely damaging if Google can come up with some kind of evidence that Uber is actually using some of its trade secrets.

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.

This case was started when Google discovered that Uber's Spider prototype was identical to an early Google lidar. It now appears that they haven't been using it primarily, but your hypothetical smoking gun is literally the foundation of this case.

My impression -- and I could be wrong, I haven't seen a lot of discussion of the Spider since the early stages of the case -- is that it was less similar than it initially appeared.

Do you know of any place with actual transcripts of the entire hearing?

My reading of the article was that they'd dropped patents from the case entirely, but that quote might have been misleading.

I don't. I do remember Judge Alsup raised concerns about Waymo being able to show damages from these patent infringements a while ago. I believe that this was part of the reason that Waymo revised their claims, and might point to why the spider prototype isn't as much of a smoking gun as we expect.

When making this statement:

> "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.

Oh, yes. Yes, he is.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com