Alphabet Sues Uber Over Trade Secrets -- WSJ
February 24 2017 - 3:02AM
Dow Jones News
By Tim Higgins and Jack Nicas
Google parent Alphabet Inc.'s heated rivalry with Uber
Technologies Inc. over self-driving cars has spilled into the
courthouse, after the internet giant sued the ride-hailing company
for allegedly stealing trade secrets to jump-start its own
autonomous vehicle program.
Anthony Levandowski, a former key manager in the Google
self-driving car project, is accused of secretly downloading 14,000
files in December 2015 before departing Alphabet last year to
create Otto, a self-driving truck maker acquired last year by
Uber.
This information was allegedly used by Uber to develop a laser
sensor for self-driving navigation, according to the lawsuit filed
by Alphabet's Waymo LLC unit on Thursday in U.S. District Court in
San Francisco.
"We take the allegations made against Otto and Uber employees
seriously and we will review this matter carefully," said an Uber
spokeswoman, who declined to make Mr. Levandowski available.
Waymo claims other former employees who are now at Uber also
allegedly downloaded confidential information about the laser
sensor before they left Waymo, including supplier lists and
manufacturing details.
"Defendants leveraged stolen information to shortcut the process
and purportedly build a comparable (laser sensor) system in only
nine months, " Waymo's complaint said.
Waymo said in a blog post Thursday that it spent thousands of
hours and millions of dollars to develop its proprietary
laser-sensor system. "Misappropriating this technology is akin to
stealing a secret recipe from a beverage company," the company
said.
Among the records allegedly taken by Mr. Levandowski, according
to the suit, were the circuit board designs for Waymo's lidar, or
light detection and ranging system used to guide a vehicle. Waymo
said in the suit that a vendor "inadvertently" copied one of its
employees on an email in December 2016 discussing an Uber project
that contained the machine drawing for Uber's circuit board that
"bore a striking resemblance" to Waymo's design.
Waymo alleges in the suit that a month before Mr. Levandowski
left the company in January 2016, he "took extraordinary efforts to
raid Waymo's design server and then conceal his activities." Mr.
Levandowski allegedly installed special software on his company
laptop to access the specific computer server, and then downloaded
9.7 gigabytes of confidential data from it, according to the
suit.
He then attached an external hard drive to his laptop for eight
hours, before erasing the history of his computer, the suit said.
After that, he used his company laptop for another few minutes,
"and then inexplicably never used it again," the suit said.
The suit alleges that on Jan. 14, 2016, Mr. Levandowski met with
high-level Uber executives at Uber's headquarters in San Francisco.
A day later, he allegedly registered the company that would become
Otto, initially calling it 280 Systems, the suit said. Twelve days
later, he left Alphabet, according to the suit.
Uber bought Otto for $680 million in stock in August 2016 --
shortly after Mr. Levandowski received his final
multimillion-dollar compensation check from Alphabet, the suit
said.
The suit is the latest salvo in the friendship-turned-rivalry
between Alphabet and Uber. In 2013, Google's venture arm invested
$258 million in Uber, and longtime Google executive David Drummond
joined the startup's board. Google has let users book Uber rides in
its Google Maps app, and Uber has also used Google's mapping
software to underpin its ride-sharing service.
But as Uber has expanded its size and ambitions over the past
two years, the two companies have increasingly been on a collision
course.
Beyond self-driving cars, Uber has begun developing its own
mapping software and started a package- and food-delivery service
that competes with a similar Google offering. Google's Waze
navigation app, meanwhile, is expanding its own ride-sharing
service that lets users carpool with each other to work.
In August, Mr. Drummond said he left Uber's board "given the
overlap between the two companies."
The suit comes at a rough time for Uber, which is reeling from
sexual harassment charges from a former software engineer. The
company this week hired former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to
investigate the claims and promised to make changes to its human
resources department to better handle complaints of sexism and
harassment.
Waymo's lawsuit follows one filed by Tesla Inc. last month in a
California state court against the former director of its Autopilot
program Sterling Anderson and Chris Urmson, the former chief
technology officer of Google's self-driving project. Tesla has
accused the two of improperly recruiting people away from the auto
maker to work at their newly formed autonomous car startup. The
startup has denied wrongdoing.
--Greg Bensinger and Sara Randazzo contributed to this
article.
Write to Tim Higgins at Tim.Higgins@WSJ.com and Jack Nicas at
jack.nicas@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 24, 2017 02:47 ET (07:47 GMT)
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