Alphabet had already won the PR war. They had alot to gain by grinding Uber into the dirt. Now Alphabet comes off looking like a paper tiger for a settlement that requires Uber to do very well to have any value. Let's not forget they are a major shareholder in Lyft. I can imagine that Larry Page must not be very happy right now.
The value of the settlement for Alphabet is not in the stock, it is in the “agreement to ensure that any Waymo confidential information is not being incorporated in Uber Advanced Technologies Group hardware and software.”
Of course, the details of that aren't going to be shared, but that's the thing matters.
> Let's not forget they are a major shareholder in Lyft.
Are they? I know GV has a significant stake in Uber, and Waymo has a cooperative deal with Lyft, but I don't recall Alphabet or any of it's subsidiaries holding a big share of Lyft.
Edit: as pointed out in the response, Alphabet is invested in Lyft through CapitalG.
I mean this is better than a patent because a trade secret will never expire in perpetuity, right? I also imagine this extends to anyone acting on Uber's behalf?
So how is this not a win for Waymo?
The next Levandowski will think twice before following in this one's footsteps - even if their actions would be 100% legal. The next Kalanick will think twice before hiring him.
So having extensive monitoring on work machines is not because you don't trust your employees --- but because you don't trust that the employee's laptop / mobile device is always going to be under the control of the employee. And if it does get compromised, you want to be able to state with confidence how much data might have gotten compromised, or how much access the criminal or state sponsored attacker might have been able to gain access to.
The fact that it can also be used to find incriminating evidence for back-stabbing employees who are intent on screwing over their employer is just a bonus.
And if he wasn't smart enouh to realize this, I wonder how much Waymo lost and how much Uber gained when they lured him away from Waymo. :-)
> a settlement that requires Uber to do very well to have any value.
Waymo/Google counsel earned their annual bonus.
> You're not allowed to use other people's trade secrets anyway.
Being allowed to do something and actually doing something are two very different things.
What does this mean in a practical sense? rm -rf /car? Can the Uber engineers who worked on this continue to do so, or are they "tainted"?
That isn't true. Uber didn't use any trade secrets from waymo, thats why waymo settled. The point of the oversite is to continue to show that uber isn't using their trade secrets. There is no part of the uber tech stack that needs to be retired as an outcome of this case.
Waymo has plenty of motivation to settle if they could get adequate behavioral commitments in the settlement, even if they thought Uber had and had used Waymo trade secrets. We don't know here details of the behavioral commitments around preventing use of Waymo technology, but their existence was in the public release.
Given that, if Waymo wins the self-driving race, Uber is a likely customer and is a company Alphabet already owns a nice chunk of through GV, there is plenty of incentive to minimize cost to Uber as well as Waymo while mitigating any risk of Uber using Waymo tech. Dragging out the court process isn't in anyone's interest, whether or not Uber stole and used Waymo technology.
> Uber didn't use any trade secrets from waymo, thats why waymo settled.
This is still unclear.
> There is no part of the uber tech stack that needs to be retired as an outcome of this case.
Honestly, no one knows for sure, everything here (including my statements) is pure conjecture. Here's the reality though - Uber did not explicitly say "we absolutely 100% did not steal trade secrets". Outside the court of law, that tells me they are going to lose something of value...to what extent, I guess only Uber knows.
Not really. The settlement is an indication that someone did an ROI calculation and decided that .043% of Uber is cheaper than the cost of seeing the trial to conclusion with the possibility of losing.
If this statement is indeed true and Uber isn't totally brazen, then yes it would imply that Uber is going to have to seriously clamp down on how it uses the data/IP they got from Otto (which clearly they got from Google/Waymo). Not a lawyer, but that's how I read it.
Sure you are, you're just not allowed to reveal them. That is, once they're revealed [to outsiders], they can be used by anybody. The only cause of action that I know of is to go after the revealer (as we have here), nobody who learns (and/or uses) anything from a disclosure of trade secrets has anything to worry about.
Put if you steal the recipe to Coke and email it to Pepsi, they can't use it, even if use doesn't disclose it.
It depends on how you learn the a trade secret.
2. Isn't that exactly what this settlement is intending to do? It sets the legal precedence for "don't skirt this one, we're serious about it".
You don't toss someone a few hundred million dollars because your case is 'flimsy', and 'winning or losing' in court is too simplistic an analysis of the impact of the lawsuit on both sides as well as their third party competitors.
The Jeong article reads like someone read Uber's submissions to the court, phrased them in common vernacular, then ignored everything that didn't fit their narrative.
If Uber was in any real jeopardy of being found liable here they would have settled for far more. We know this because if Uber lost the case outright they would face an injunction against their self-driving business that would probably force them to license Waymo tech or put an end to the whole endeavor. Uber ATG is worth a lot more than what they paid in equity, and this is not an amount that matters at all to Google. The dollar figure is just there so Google can say they didn't come away with nothing.
The settlement wasn't just for money, it also barred Uber from use of some of the disputed trade secrets/technology, which could be valuable for Google. Given that Uber hasn't monetized the technology yet, it would be hard to prove any damages. The outcome of a trial could have been a similar amount and an injunction and still been a big win for Google if the future self driving market is really going to be big and if the covered technology really was crucial.
What did they get? Unjust Enrichment sized damages and mutually agreed forbearance equivalent to injunctive relief.
And that's before we get into discussing how much of a minefield discovery was becoming in the case.
2) Because prior to the trial there would have been a flurry of discovery related motions, a large amount of time pulling engineers off their jobs to have them perform witness prep at both companies, then a large period of pre-trial legal prep, then the trial itself.
At all stages, information is leaking, and expenses are going up.
... And then the appeals start.
... Then the partial re-trials and appeals on those.
Settlement is the most common way civil litigation disputes are resolved. Trials are the anomaly.
In this case, both parties likely recognized that getting into a knife fight about documentary production in a high-stakes race-to-market matter was likely in Cruise's favor, not theirs.
Was this by their own will? Back in the Oracle v Google trial, which had the same judge, he asked Oracle to cut down the 132 claims to only 3 - which Oracle was not happy about.
What was supposed to be the original slam dunk for Waymo, 'trade secret 96', Which referred to PCB circuit diagrams that were accidently emailed to Waymo instead of Uber ATG by a shared supplier, was even dropped. Waymo's whole case was pretty flimsy.
Possibly because the patents were invalid due to the existence of prior art? Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15875685
According to the article, the infringement claims were dropped after Waymo was notified of the USPTO reexamination that was going to be done due to Swildens filing the ex parte reexamination request.
>...So he took the unusual step of challenging the 936 patent himself, filing what is called an ex-parte reexamination request. He gathered the prior art he had discovered, completed reams of paperwork, and pulled together his detailed arguments into a 101-page document that he filed with the USPTO on August 1.
Waymo dropped the claims relating to the 936 patent on Sep 13.
>...Swildens, naturally, thinks his reexamination request played a role. He notes that USPTO had a phone interview with Waymo’s lawyers a few days before, on September 8, at which the examiners presumably told Waymo that a reexamination of the 936 would be going ahead. If the reexamination started while the patent was being actively litigated, Uber and the court would have to be informed.
https://www.wired.com/story/eric-swildens-uber-waymo-lawsuit...
there isn’t a clear link to how those documents got onto Uber computers
> Can you really explain eight self-driving car trade secrets in 45 minutes?
Maybe I'm fooling myself, but I think I can do that in 45 seconds.
- hey what's your learning rate scheduling for module X?
- we use an EMA with coefficient 1e-4
- oh great, and for Y, do you do constant strides?
- no we use backtracking to figure out some sampling heuristic
The parent was also a bad comment that deserved to be flagged, but since you took a step further in the wrong direction, yours was the one I chided.
Even if 90% of readers guess your intent correctly—an unlikely number—that leaves hundreds if not thousands who read it the other way. It doesn't take much to provoke some of them into replying in kind, and that's the downward spiral we're trying to avoid here.
Nah, people who support nullification based on perception of the specific case and offender circumstances are not generally less logical and articulate than others.
You obviously want to eliminate people who either see the law as inherently just or see it as important to uphold the law even when the result would be unjust, as well as people inclined to see punishing your client as just despite the circumstances. But there's no reason, in general, to think that logical thinking or articulateness are, in general, going to be good correlated for those moral inclinations.
The point is that smart people are not always dismissed. Different legal strategies work better with different jury selections.
Lawyers don't “always try to dismiss smart people from juries”, or even try to identify smart people.
They do try to remove people that they expect will be more likely than average to be unfavorably inclined to their client or specific arguments, or that they expect to be a wildcard because they will be unable to restrict themselves to the courtroom presentation.
Neither of those, in general, is particularly correlated with intelligence.
Also use LBFG so you never worry about learning rate.
Literally never happens in practice.
If self-driving car ML is "data scientists replacing a driver with computers", architecture search is computers replacing data scientists. $1.2M is roughly 3-4 data scientists' annual compensations at a company like Google or Uber.
Finding hyperparameters for an existing architecture is much easier because you would typically deal with a much lower cardinality in hyperparameter space. SigOpt is helping with that. Google has an internal solution that is able to take advantage of parameters within their job scheduling infrastructure (they actually have a bunch of them, the one I'm talking about is called hyperband [0]). CERN, as far as I know, was using hyperopt [1]. Avant uses an open-source version of SigOpt that we wrote in 2016 called loop [2].
[0] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.06560.pdf [1] - http://hyperopt.github.io/hyperopt [2] - https://github.com/avantoss/loop
I dont understand it, but I want to.
It's worth it
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16993208/waymo-v-uber-tria...
Summary - Waymo was claiming Uber violated 8 trade secrets (down from 100s), and had only directly discussed these trade secrets for 45 minutes over the past week. "Can you really explain eight self-driving car trade secrets in 45 minutes?"
"And then there’s the part where Anthony Levandowski is not on trial, Uber is. Even if Levandowski took 14,000 confidential documents, that doesn’t mean that Uber did something wrong — there isn’t a clear link to how those documents got onto Uber computers or were used in Uber self-driving cars."