It is both. What happens if they admit to stealing trade secrets, and clearly intend to continue to compete in the market? Could the judge literally kick them out of the industry, or force the company to disband by labeling it an illegal organization?

Someone I know worked for a tech company in the valley back in the eighties that made high end medical equipment. They caught an American and Japanese company trying to reverse engineer one of their products. End result was both companies were bared from that market for something like 15 years.

This story is missing something, since reverse engineering is legal and done properly [1] gets you around copyrights and trade secrets. We're patents involved?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

My guess is corporate espionage. For them to get an injunction like this, they probably paid members of the engineering team to give them proprietary information.

You're going to have a hard time proving it was done properly, clean room, etc, when one of the heads of your department on the topic was a key engineer of the technology you are supposedly reverse engineering when he worked on it at the competitor who developed it.

I guess Uber wants us to believe that Lewandowski downloaded the files for some other purpose than using the information in the job he was going to start in a few days.

Flip side, he can't be barred from using his skills as long as you document clean room procedures.

Thanks, I have a knee-jerk reaction to "reverse engineering is illegal / a tort" statements without nuance.

Why is reverse engineering illegal (unless covered by a patent)?

My recollection is reverse engineering is legal, but it needs to be done carefully. Using staff that designed the "thing" you are trying to reverse engineer is not part of the doing it carefully bit...

OK, it is not THAT bad.

The very worst worst case scenario is that Uber would be barred from using rotating, parabolic, Lidars.

But there are a lot of other ways of making self driving cars that don't use this specific method of sensor technology.

Uber could even just come to an agreement with Google, and license the technology.

It very much looks like Uber did this premeditated and that Travis and the Otto guy planned this while he was still at Google. It is VERY bad for Uber and they could get hit with much worse than just being banned from using a specific technology. The judge has already referred the case to the USA's office for possible criminal charges. Maybe we'll actually see an executive thrown in jail for once.

while I'd love to see this, I think that is highly doubtful :(

Why do you think it is highly doubtful?

Because Wall Street executives caused the economy to collapse and only one of them got thrown in jail. Executives only end up in jail when they hurt the rich (see: Enron, Bernie Madoff)

But Uber is not a Wall Street firm. And Google claims Uber has hurt it, and Google is very rich.

I imagine injunctive relief is an option for Waymo that could limit Uber's options for some time.