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.