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Comment by woodandsteel | Hacker News Reader

I think what happened is Levandowski and Uber acted in a very suspicious way that lead Waymo to conclude that Uber must have stolen its IP. But then when it came to discovery they couldn't find solid evidence (either because the property was not used, or Uber managed to destroy the evidence), and so Waymo realized it was probably going to lose the trial.

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.

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This theory is so wildly off from what my lawyer friends have told me about the case (including one who has 5+ years of IP law experience)

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.

If you look at the settlement number, 0.34% of Uber at 72B (yes, 72B, not 45B as the recent down round which would equate to 150M), then you'll see that Google did not expect to win this case.

Nobody said that Google expected to win the case.

The question remains what really happened. One possibility is that Levandowski and Uber really did have a plan to steal Waymo's technology, but then didn't actually use it. Like maybe it wasn't as good as Uber thought it would be, or for some other reason they didn't adopt it.

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.

> 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.

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 doubt they destroyed evidence - if they acted nefariously, they probably just operated in a manner that did not generate evidence. I'm just a middling employee in a big company and it is drilled into my head how to, basically, not leave a paper trail for important topics.

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