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.