> 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.