The race to develop self-driving vehicles took a new turn on Thursday, when Google parent Alphabet Inc filed a lawsuit against Uber Technologies Inc accusing it of stealing technology.
Alphabet contends that a manager at its autonomous car subsidiary Waymo LLC took technical data with him when he left to launch a competing venture that went on to become Otto, Uber’s self-driving vehicle unit, in a reported US$680 million deal.
“Otto and Uber have taken Waymo’s intellectual property so that they could avoid incurring the risk, time and expense of independently developing their own technology,” Waymo said in a San Francisco federal court filing.
Waymo is calling for a trial to stop Otto and Uber from using what it said is patented technology.
Waymo also wants unspecified damages in what it described in court documents as “an action for trade secret misappropriation, patent infringement and unfair competition.”
‘CALCULATED THEFT’
The company argued that a “calculated theft” of its technology “reportedly netted Otto employees over half a billion dollars and allowed Uber to revive a stalled program, all at Waymo’s expense.”
Responding to a request for comment, an Uber spokeswoman said in an e-mail that “we take the allegations made against Otto and Uber employees seriously and we will review this matter carefully.”
The California-based ride-sharing service last year acquired commercial transport-focused tech start-up Otto as it pressed ahead with its pursuit of self-driving technology.
Anthony Levandowski, a cofounder of Otto, a 90-person start-up, was put in charge of Uber’s efforts to develop self-driving technology for personal driving, delivery and trucking.
Waymo’s lawsuit contends that Levandowski downloaded more than 14,000 proprietary files from a highly confidential design server to a laptop in December 2015.
A week later, after removing a data storage card, Levandowski reformatted the company laptop in what the suit maintains was an attempt to erase any trace of what happened to the downloaded data.
CRITICAL COMPONENT
The suit is focused on proprietary information about lidar sensors, which use lasers to scan and essentially enable vehicles to “see” what is around them, according to the lawsuit.
The information stored on the Waymo server wound up at Otto, it said.
Waymo said it has invested tens of millions of dollars in the technology.
“Thanks in part to this highly advanced lidar technology, Waymo became the first company to complete a fully self-driving trip on public roads in a vehicle without a steering wheel,” the suit said.
After downloading confidential information regarding Waymo’s lidar systems and other technology while working at Waymo, Levandowski attended meetings with high-level executives at Uber’s headquarters in San Francisco in January last year, the lawsuit said.
By the end of that month, Levandowski officially formed a venture that would become Otto and resigned from Waymo, according to the court filing.
A self-driving truck built by Otto made a pioneering delivery of beer in Colorado in November last year.
An 18-wheeler made the 190km trip from Fort Collins through the center of crowded Denver to Colorado Springs using only its panoply of cameras, radar and sensors to read the road.
Uber is also trying out a self-driving car service in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
To many, Tatu City on the outskirts of Nairobi looks like a success. The first city entirely built by a private company to be operational in east Africa, with about 25,000 people living and working there, it accounts for about two-thirds of all foreign investment in Kenya. Its low-tax status has attracted more than 100 businesses including Heineken, coffee brand Dormans, and the biggest call-center and cold-chain transport firms in the region. However, to some local politicians, Tatu City has looked more like a target for extortion. A parade of governors have demanded land worth millions of dollars in exchange
An Indonesian animated movie is smashing regional box office records and could be set for wider success as it prepares to open beyond the Southeast Asian archipelago’s silver screens. Jumbo — a film based on the adventures of main character, Don, a large orphaned Indonesian boy facing bullying at school — last month became the highest-grossing Southeast Asian animated film, raking in more than US$8 million. Released at the end of March to coincide with the Eid holidays after the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, the movie has hit 8 million ticket sales, the third-highest in Indonesian cinema history, Film
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) revenue jumped 48 percent last month, underscoring how electronics firms scrambled to acquire essential components before global tariffs took effect. The main chipmaker for Apple Inc and Nvidia Corp reported monthly sales of NT$349.6 billion (US$11.6 billion). That compares with the average analysts’ estimate for a 38 percent rise in second-quarter revenue. US President Donald Trump’s trade war is prompting economists to retool GDP forecasts worldwide, casting doubt over the outlook for everything from iPhone demand to computing and datacenter construction. However, TSMC — a barometer for global tech spending given its central role in the
Alchip Technologies Ltd (世芯), an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designer specializing in server chips, expects revenue to decline this year due to sagging demand for 5-nanometer artificial intelligence (AI) chips from a North America-based major customer, a company executive said yesterday. That would be the first contraction in revenue for Alchip as it has been enjoying strong revenue growth over the past few years, benefiting from cloud-service providers’ moves to reduce dependence on Nvidia Corp’s expensive AI chips by building their own AI accelerator by outsourcing chip design. The 5-nanometer chip was supposed to be a new growth engine as the lifecycle
RSS