Uber/Waymo case goes to US Attorney for possible criminal probe
US District Court Judge William Alsup has referred the autonomous vehicle legal battle between Uber and Waymo to the United States Attorney's office, “for investigation of possible theft of trade secrets based on the evidentiary record supplied thus far”. The decision could be a significant blow to Uber's ambitions of developing self-driving vehicles. Uber is also waiting to hear whether the judge will impose an injunction on testing its autonomous vehicles.
Things don't look good for Uber and autonomous vehicle wunderkind Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer who now leads the startup's robocar program.

This week, US District Court Judge William Alsup made two key decisions in the lawsuit between Google's autonomous vehicle spinoff Waymo and Uber. You know, the one accusing Levandowski of swiping 14,000 confidential documents from Waymo and taking them with him to Uber.

First, Alsup rebuffed Uber's efforts to settle the case in arbitration, so the drama will play out publicly during a trial. Waymo loved that. “We welcome the court’s decision today, and we look forward to holding Uber responsible in court for its misconduct,” it said in a statement.

More troubling for Levandowski, Alsup referred the case to the US Attorney’s office "for investigation of possible theft of trade secrets based on the evidentiary record supplied thus far." Translated from legalese, Alsup thinks something criminal might have happened here and that the feds ought to take a look. That raises the possibility of prison time for Levandowski.

Such a referral is “quite, quite rare,” says Peter Toren, an intellectual property lawyer and former Department of Justice attorney. “For a judge to do that, he must believe there’s a lot of smoke, if not fire, for criminal violations.”

Things could go from bad to worse for Uber if the judge grants Waymo's request to put the brakes on the startup's robocar testing. As of Friday night, the court had not yet unsealed Alsup's decision on that, so stay tuned.

Laser Fight

This brouhaha started when Waymo filed the suit on February 23. Waymo claims that Levandowski illicitly downloaded 14,000 technical files, included plans for Waymo’s lidar, the laser sensor that allows autonomous vehicles to "see." The suit alleges that Levandowski took those documents with him when he quit in early 2016 and launched the autonomous trucking outfit Otto. Uber acquired Otto for $680 million in August and put Levandowski in charge of its robocar research.

Waymo claims Levandowski used its intellectual property to accelerate Uber’s program, which started about four years after Waymo’s. Two weeks after filing the suit, Waymo sought a preliminary injunction forcing Uber to stop using any technology derived from its IP, including the lidar system. This could deliver a crushing blow to Uber's R&D, because lidar is widely seen as fundamental to the type of vehicles Uber is working on.

Alsup was impressed by the evidence Waymo presented. "You have one of the strongest records I’ve seen for a long time of anybody doing something that bad,” Alsup said during a hearing last week. "Good for you."

Of course, that doesn't mean Uber is guilty of anything, but it was enough to convince Alsup to refer all of that evidence, along with everything Uber's counsel has gathered in the case, to the US Attorney's office in San Francisco. We're talking terabytes of information. You can be sure that federal prosecutors will scrutinize it all. “If you get a referral, and I did get one or two in my career, you obviously take that very seriously,” says Toren.