Facing a lawsuit from Google over driverless car technology, Uber may finally have met its match – Los Angeles Times

On the surface,a Google subsidiarys blistering accusation last week that Uber has stolen its driverless car technology looks like any of the thousands of patent lawsuits piling up in Silicon Valley court dockets.

This one is different, however. And its different in ways that could spell bad news for Uber.

The lawsuit was filed Thursday in San Francisco federal court by Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. devoted to developing self-driving technology. (Alphabet is the new name for Google.) Waymo is responsible for those bug-shaped cars and other vehicles testing the technology around Northern California. Theyre equipped with sophisticated laser systems that create a 3-D picture of the landscape, allowing the vehicles to navigate around obstacles.

Waymo says that Anthony Levandowski, who was once Googles driverless-car guru, downloaded 14,000 proprietary company files onto his own computer and absconded with them when he left Google to found his own company in 2016. That company, Otto, was soon acquired by Uber for $680 million. Not long after that, Google says, it discovered that Ottos technology was largely identical to its own. The lawsuit seeks damages for alleged infringement of three Google patents and an injunction barring Uber from using any of the technology.

One aspect of the lawsuit that struck some Silicon Valley observers from the first was the extensive detail in the accusations.

Normally in a case like this, theres a lot of innuendo in the early stages, says Eric Goldman, a patent law expert at Santa Clara University law school. But Waymo specified how and when it alleges Levandowski downloaded the files, the breadth of his alleged theft and efforts to conceal his actions, and how it discovered them from an email a supplier sent to members of Levandowskis team and mistakenly copied to a Waymo employee.

Google spent a lot of time and money investigating before it filed the lawsuit, Goldman told me.

Of course, the lawsuit represents just one side of the story. Uber hasnt yet responded in court. In a statement, the company said it had reviewedWaymo's claims anddetermined them to be a baseless attempt to slow down a competitor. Uber added, We look forward to vigorously defending against them in court.

Another unusual aspect of the case, Goldman says, is that Google is bringing it at all. Intellectual property lawsuits are out of character for Google, he says, even though it has so many former employees that a large amount of its IP must be at large in the technology community. They just dont show up as a plaintiff, he says. Moreover, Google is an investor in Uber with a stake of at least $250 million; a Google executive sat on Ubers board until just after Uber acquired Otto.

Google hasnt said much about why this episode should be different from any others, beyond a Waymo blog post that implies it was just too gross an offense to ignore.

These actions were part of a concerted plan to steal Waymos trade secrets and intellectual property, the post reads. Given the overwhelming facts...we have no choice but to defend our investment and development of this unique technology.

I asked Google to elaborate, but havent heard back.

Goldman conjectures further that this might be an asset especially valuable to the Google family, something extra important.If thats so, it underscores the grand expectations for driverless technology, despite indications that it may be oversold. Google has been among the most enthusiastic developers in the field; just last year, Eric Schmidt, its executive chairman, crowed that "the technology worksbecause, frankly, the computer can see better than you can, even if you're not drunk in a car.

The lawsuit says the markets for self-driving cars are nascent and on the cusp of rapid development. It asserts that the companys fleet of self-driving cars has logged 2.5 million miles on public roads, which it says equates to over 300 years of human driving experience. Its arithmetic is murky, however, since Americans alone log more than 3 trillion miles everyyear. In any event, some experts believe that a transition to fully autonomous cars the ones you nap in, rather than paying at least some attention to the road could be decades away.

Obviously, theres a lot at stake in the case for big, brash Uber. The company has built its reputation as a juggernaut by flouting local car-hire regulations and bullying municipal officials who dare to stand in its way. Google may not be as inclined to back off as your city alderman.

As my colleague Tracey Lien observed Friday, the lawsuit capped a bad stretch for Uber. That started with a boycott of the firm after it was perceived to have taken advantage of a taxi drivers strike at New Yorks JFK airport to protest President Trumps immigrant ban. It was followed by a devastating picture of a sexual harassment culture at Uber headquarters posted online by a former engineer, Susan Fowler Rigetti. Now comes Waymos unusually detailed accusation of intellectual property thievery.

The case may also underscore the weakness of Ubers claim to a $70-billion valuation in the private venture market. That valuation had been based on the expectation that Uber was poised to radically reform the transportation-for-hire economy by shouldering vehicle-owning taxi companies and individuals out of the way, replacing them with independent drivers using their own cars. If Google is to be believed, Uber now puts such stake in owning its own capital assets that it waswilling to pay $680 million for the necessary (allegedly stolen)technology.

Moving from a business model in which the company essentially owns nothing but skims a vigorish of 25% or more off the fares paid to its independent contractors, to one in which it owns and must continue to develop a fleet of its own vehicles represents a major change of direction. As transportation expert Hubert Horan observed in a detailed critique of Uber last December, it is unclear why investors would wager billions on the prospect that it will eventually be able to design and build highly sophisticated vehicles more efficiently than competitors such as Google, Tesla, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, Ford and General Motors.

The allegations in the lawsuit imply that Uber went to great lengths to obtain its driverless technology. The core allegation concerns its light detection and ranging system, orLiDAR, which coordinates and interprets in real timethe signals returned from laser beams bouncing off objects in the real world. Waymo says its LiDAR is the most advanced in the fieldanda trade secret.

According to the lawsuit, while Levandowski was managing Waymo, he was plotting to start his own competing company. Starting in December 2015, he downloaded 14,000 Waymo files, including specifications for its LiDAR system, from a company laptop, the lawsuit alleges,then he erased and reformatted the laptop to eliminate evidence of what he had done. Within weeks he resigned from Waymo and launched Otto. Other Waymo employees soon followed him out the door, taking other trade secrets, the lawsuit says.

Then, last December, a Waymo employee was sent a copy of an email destined for the Otto team. It happened, the lawsuit said,to include a rendering of an Otto circuit board that bore a striking resemblance to a circuit board design that Levandowski had downloaded.

Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow@hiltzikmon Twitter, see hisFacebook page, or emailmichael.hiltzik@latimes.com.

Return to Michael Hiltzik's blog.

See the original post:

Facing a lawsuit from Google over driverless car technology, Uber may finally have met its match - Los Angeles Times