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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Waymo was launched by Google last year.
The 28-page lawsuit focuses on Otto, a self-driving trucking company that Uber acquired last year. The suit charges that Anthony Levandowski, a former Google employee, downloaded 14,000 "highly confidential" files describing self-driving technology research and brought them to Otto, which he co-founded.
Parts of the lawsuit read like a spy novel. Waymo alleges Levandowski, who now works at Uber, used special software to access the files and reformatted his computer to cover his tracks. It says Uber used the information after it acquired Otto.
The lawsuit complicates the already-difficult relationship between the two companies. GV, Alphabet's venture capital arm, invested in Uber in 2013. It was one of the firm's most high-profile deals.
"Our parent company Alphabet has long worked with Uber in many areas, and we didn't make this decision lightly," Waymo said in a blog post. "However, given the overwhelming facts that our technology has been stolen, we have no choice but to defend our investment and development of this unique technology."
"We take the allegations made against Otto and Uber employees seriously," an Uber spokeswoman said. "We will review this matter carefully."
Self-driving cars are a red-hot area of research in the automotive industry. Autonomous vehicles show the potential to greatly reduce or even eliminate the tens of thousands of deaths that occur on US roads every year. The technology may also reduce traffic jams, a major fuel and time waster in US cities. Equipment suppliers, start-ups and big tech companies, in addition to automakers, are all developing self-driving car technology.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26 2017, @04:54PM
What's the chance that this isn't what it looks like from the outside? There are certainly cases where two big players in a market have maintained protracted litigation (often over patents)...which has the effect of keeping others from trying to get into the same business.
One example I'm aware of was windshield wiper litigation, "A later patent war, between Trico and rival windshield-wiper company Anco, stretched from the mid-1940s until 1971, making it one of the longest-running lawsuits of its day." From https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/magazine/who-made-that-windshield-wiper.html [nytimes.com]
This patent fight benefited both companies by helping them maintain their duopoly.