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Engineer spends $6,000 invalidating Waymo's lidar patents
An engineer with no connection to the self-driving industry has spent $6,000 of his own money to stop Alphabet's self-driving car business Waymo from patenting key technology. Following a challenge filed by Eric Swildens, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) rejected 53 out of 56 claims in Waymo's 936 patent. The reason for his action? He just "couldn't imagine the [lidar] circuit [described in the 936 patent] didn't exist prior," Ars Technica reported.
Filed in 2013 and granted in 2016, the 936 patent was a cornerstone of Waymo's lawsuit against Uber, which began in December 2016. In a nutshell, Waymo accused the ride-hailing giant of infringing its lidar design patent and using intellectual property allegedly stolen by engineer Anthony Levandowski. Uber eventually agreed to redesign its lidar and gave Waymo $245 million worth of equity to settle the rest of the lawsuit. It also promised not to copy Waymo's technology in the future.
Uber got slammed for nothing!
Previously: A Spectator Who Threw A Wrench In The Waymo/Uber Lawsuit
Waymo and Uber Abruptly Settle for $245 Million
Related: Waymo's Case Against Uber "Shrinks" After Trade Secret Claim Thrown Out
Waymo v. Uber Jury Trial Begins
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 03 2018, @01:00PM (2 children)
You can bet that if the engineers at Uber could prove that they developed their circuits independently of Waymo's designs, they would have fought that case and won.
This form of IP protection is good, IMO - engineers leaving Waymo with a copy of the company's work on a thumb drive, then leaning heavily on those designs to develop the same system for Uber is theft. If they just left with the knowledge in their head, by the time they were done re-developing the system at Uber they should have made several different choices along the way: optimal choices change over time... That "independently developed" system improves the state of things overall, whereas an under-talented copy of a prior design generally doesn't work as well as the original - not everybody from the prior team moves to the new company, designs are copied without knowing why choices were made or even how the black boxes work, etc.
It's good that 936 is being invalidated, but I think it is also good that it was useable in the Uber case. I guess what I'm getting around to is: fuzzy copyright, for a limited term (say 15-20 years) would be a great replacement for both copyright and patent in the world of software and hardware design, after all hardware these days is specified almost like a computer program.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by arslan on Thursday October 04 2018, @05:29AM (1 child)
Yes, Uber probably felt guilty - probably at the behest of their highly paid lawyers sowing FUD because its a lowly engineers word so they can't be trusted. Enough to not bother throwing some cheap engineering resource, relative to the lawyers, at doing a quick pass at the patents... fucking lawyers.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 04 2018, @02:43PM
In the cases of tech exfiltration that I have had contact with, the perps were amazingly sloppy about leaving a clear evidence trail back to the stolen code - like, usually a massive import of code which still contains copyright and other text, then a source control repository showing how they modified from that point.
🌻🌻 [google.com]