
Waymo vs. Uber: unsealed court documents reveal damning evidence - PleaseHelpMe
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/3/16408724/waymo-uber-lewandowski-travis-kalanick
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Multicomp
"Yeah, uh huh, I shredded the 5 drives...after copying them to a new WD
passport that I've yet to connect to a work computer."

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gvb
Context:

 _Here, the story takes a bizarre twist. The investigators visited the
shredding facility twice in an effort to confirm Levandowski’s story, but when
they showed Levandowski’s picture to employees, no one recognized him._

 _Levandowski also claimed that he had paid in cash and had not received a
receipt. But the shredding facility told investigators that “all destructions
are recorded on a triplicate, carbon-copy receipt” with details about date,
time, service and payment. Although investigators did find a record of five
disks being destroyed and paid for in cash, the shredding happened on an
entirely different day in March, and the signature was “illegible.”_

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beager
Rather than the main road of remarking about how the bad optics and evidence
continue to get worse, I will say that this also reaffirms my sense that Uber
is just not that good at the sort of machiavellian maneuvering that the SV
crowd lauds them for. Ethics aside, this makes them seem less than competent
at their unethical behavior.

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wpietri
Yeah. I can almost respect calculating evil. There's something impressive
about a very competent villain. But this fits right into Travis's long history
of self-aggrandizing arrogance. So very many scandals[1], most of them
entirely unnecessary.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/uber-
trav...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/uber-travis-
kalanick-scandal-pr-disaster-timeline)

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aetherson
I read the report. It certainly demonstrates that Levandowski retained Google
data (but we knew that already), that Levandowski recruited to form Otto
before he left Google (but we knew that already), that Uber always planned to
buy Otto, dating back to before Levandowski left Google (if we didn't know
that, we had pretty strong suspicions), and that Levandowski is kind of a
scuzzball (but again, we knew that).

But it doesn't appear to offer any good evidence that Google's trade secrets
made it to Uber. Which is what actual "damning evidence" would be.

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mabbo
It's not about whether they succeeded, it's about whether they tried. And it
seems they did indeed try.

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aetherson
Levandowski and the Otto guys aren't on trial. The question is whether Uber
received trade secrets, not on whether or not Levandowski took trade secrets
away from Google (which, again, does not seem to be in doubt).

I don't see anything in the report which provides even strong suggestions that
Uber received material from Google. I mean, I don't think that the report
rules it out, either. But at _most_ , it kind of hints that Levandowski was
the kind of guy who might have tried to get the data over to Uber. Which we
basically already knew. That's certainly not damning evidence.

I bet that Uber's lawyers will point to some of the clown car antics
documented in this report and say, "Come on, if these guys actually had moved
trade secrets over to Uber, obviously they would have left material evidence
that they did so. Clearly they were not great at covering up their actions."

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revelation
My favorite part is Levandowski emptying his empty trash _during_ the
interview.

That said, apparently you do not need to know anything about file systems to
pass a Google interview.

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MBCook
This is just a civil case, so we go by preponderance of the evidence right?

If Uber/Otto are shown to have done incredibly weird/questionable stuff but
Google/Waymo can’t show any of the information was used would Uber/Otto still
be liable for anything?

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aetherson
I am not a lawyer.

One of the ways a suit can be dismissed is if the judge determines that even
if all of your side's evidence is accepted purely on its face, the result is
not evidence of an actionable case. This is exactly to prevent it from being
the case that you can get in front of a jury and say, "Well, I don't actually
have evidence for my case, but look what a terrible person the respondent is,"
and making an appeal to emotion.

Of course, this is all human judgment, lines are fuzzy, and you can't predict
any given case. But it's supposed to be that you have to show preponderance of
evidence _of something that is a valid reason to sue_ , not, like,
preponderance of evidence that the respondent is a slimeball and it seems
plausible that his character is such that he might have done something that
you have no evidence of.

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CPLX
Yeah sure. But the stuff in this report _is_ evidence. Perhaps you're
unfamiliar with how actual litigation works, but it's not always the case that
you have crystal clear surveillance video of something or "I did the bad
things" written in a recovered email.

You have to decide what the most plausible version of events is given the
preponderance of the evidence. You have to use what you can see to decide the
most likely scenario that you can't see. All this deleting end hiding things
_is_ evidence of bad acts, it speaks to the behavior and intent of the people
in question, and it's entirely and thoroughly inconsistent with the actions of
someone who was behaving ethically.

People talk about circumstantial evidence like it's a "gotcha" that means
there's no real evidence. That's a common fallacy. Circumstantial evidence is
evidence. And activity consistent with a cover up is in fact evidence that
supports allegations of underlying bad behavior.

The legal system isn't a computer program, it uses people and their judgement
and intuition about human behavior to figure things out. That's by design.

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ukulele
The people in question all lied so much that you can't even put together a
straight narrative... seems to be a moderately effective defense.

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gvb
That is where depositions come in. Keeping all the lies consistent across time
and consistent between different involved people is incredibly hard. The
deposition process is used to expose those inconsistencies.

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”

― Mark Twain

IMHO that is why Uber stonewalled Waymo for as long as possible on this
evidence and worked so hard to give Waymo as little time as possible for
depositions. This is also why Waymo is looking for relief (e.g. delay) from
the courts. IANAL, but I expect the judge will be sympathetic to Waymo's
requests given how egregious Uber's behavior was.

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fstuff
If this is a dup where's the main thread?

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beager
That's what I was thinking. This is a dupe but the main thread didn't get
upvoted at all. Convenient way to bury unsavory news.

