Indeed, however he's also suggesting that said evidence is missing under very suspicious circumstances:

> "That the most important witness in the case [Levandowski], somehow his own files got overlooked. That's very suspicious."

Is he not implicating Uber in that, or at the very least Uber's legal counsel?

My read is that all of this bad behavior on the part of Levandowski (and Kalanick) and so forth will be extremely damaging if Google can come up with some kind of evidence that Uber is actually using some of its trade secrets.

Like, if Uber had a prototype that was clearly very closely related to Google's prototype, then it would be very hard for Uber to credibly suggest that the similarities are just coincidence, that there was parallel evolution or something. But without a link to something that Uber actually produced or used, what Google has is an iron-clad case that Levandowski took their IP and acted like a douchebag, and an iron-clad case that Uber was at least retroactively aware of that, and very little case that Uber took their technology.

This case was started when Google discovered that Uber's Spider prototype was identical to an early Google lidar. It now appears that they haven't been using it primarily, but your hypothetical smoking gun is literally the foundation of this case.

My impression -- and I could be wrong, I haven't seen a lot of discussion of the Spider since the early stages of the case -- is that it was less similar than it initially appeared.

Do you know of any place with actual transcripts of the entire hearing?

My reading of the article was that they'd dropped patents from the case entirely, but that quote might have been misleading.

I don't. I do remember Judge Alsup raised concerns about Waymo being able to show damages from these patent infringements a while ago. I believe that this was part of the reason that Waymo revised their claims, and might point to why the spider prototype isn't as much of a smoking gun as we expect.

When making this statement:

> "That the most important witness in the case [Levandowski], somehow his own files got overlooked. That's very suspicious."

I think the judge was specifically referring to this fact:

> Uber also said, just this weekend, that it found that Levandowski's e-mails from his startup, Otto Trucking, hadn't been properly migrated to Uber and weren't produced.

So I read it as he's raising the Vulcan eyebrow at Uber for that.

Oh, yes. Yes, he is.

And he's even more directly telling Uber's lead attorney in the case that he (Alsup) doesn't care what consequences he (the attorney) gets for playing stupid (and unethical) hide-the-document games during discovery, because those consequences are his own fault.

Uber's behavior in this case has been one of three things: behavior of those who don't think the rules apply to them, behavior of those who are unaware of how badly the court can hurt them, or behavior of those who have something that they are desperate to hide.

I mean if Uber can just openly destroy evidence yeah it's going to be hard to link them to a crime.

Is this belief based on any knowledge of similarities of the alleged infringing product? Judge Alsup seem to disagree with you since the end product that Waymo sued Uber over seem very different:

"Waymo alleged that Uber had stolen its trade secrets and had been violating four patents. Waymo had people signing, under oath, statements about how they could tell the patents had been violated. It's now turned out that the patent claims have completely vanished. They've been dropped. The expert you had was way out of bounds. There was no patent infringement. I think when Waymo got into this case, it thought it was going to go into the files and find an exact duplicate of the Waymo files. As it turns out, the product is dissimilar in a lot of ways. It may even be a vast improvement over what was going on Waymo. So they've come up short there."

Who doesn't think they are? Their entire business is based on evading laws, regulations, and the people who enforce them.

Courts are based on facts, not popular opinions, and it's innocent until proven guilty.

If there really was patent infringement, then it would be difficult to erase all traces. Similar to the Zenimax Oculus lawsuit where computers were erased, but the verdict still came down against Oculus.

> it's innocent until proven guilty

Civil case. Preponderance of evidence is enough. And the defense standing over a shredder pushing stolen documents through, paying for the shredding of a hard drive in cash months after it was supposed to be done, delaying discovery and magically disappearing a boatload of files from a company already known publicly to act scummy looks a fucking lot like a preponderance of evidence. All Waymo needs to do is tell the story the way they see it to a jury - too many dots connect up perfectly.

My guess is that the only reason this case is still going is that Uber can't come up with settlement terms (i.e. billions of dollars of cash) Waymo will accept.

It's important to note that whether something infringes on a Patent is in no way effected by the method of discovery.

If I invent something and Patent it, you can independently invent it and you're still infringing on my Patent.

Provenance is only important for Copyright and Trade Secrets.

(I think. IANAL.)

Their business is based on transporting people relatively short distances. All involved parties are consenting. That this is in violation of any laws or regulations is the true injustice.

Lack of proper insurance has been a big issue with Uber, and someone that gets hit didn't consent.

There are bad taxi laws out there, but the number of good taxi laws is not negligible.

Does Uber not spring for insurance for all drivers when they’re actively transporting now?

agreed, I think that's the point of the article - the grey area is very large here. Judge Alsup slapped both Uber and Waymo/Google over the wrist and "With that, Alsup got up and retired to his chambers." seems like a good character to have on "Sillicon Valley" for a bit of contrast

I would be stunned if it's OK for someone to have proprietary info all over their house and laptop and it's fine as long as you can't find those bits on other computers owned by their new employer.

I, on the other hand, would be stunned if I hired someone from my competitor (Absolutely okay in my book), they later find things he stole from his previous employer and then judge me for having them without needing to proof it.

The question is, if you find out about the trade secrets before you get sued, how far do you have to go? Do you have to fire the employee and will you have to report this to the other company? Or is it enough to not use the secrets?