Waymo And Uber's Settlement Is A Good Thing: Focus On Innovating, Not Litigating
from the took-too-long-already dept
Back in December, right before the Waymo/Uber trial was supposed to begin (before it got delayed due to an unexpected bombshell about withholding evidence that... never actually came up at the trial), I had a discussion with another reporter about the case, in which we each expressed our surprise that a settlement hadn't been worked out before going to trial. It seemed as though part of the case was really about the two companies really disliking each other, rather than there being a really strong legal case.
A year ago, when the case was filed, I expressed disappointment at seeing Google filing this kind of lawsuit. My concern was mainly over the patent part of the case (which were dropped pretty early on), and the fact that Google, historically, had shied away from suing competitors over patents, tending to mostly use them defensively. But I had concerns about the "trade secrets" parts of the case as well. While there does seem to be fairly clear evidence that Anthony Levandowski -- the ex-Google employee at the heart of the discussion -- did some sketchy things in the process of leaving Google, starting Otto, and quickly selling Otto to Uber, the case still felt a lot like a backdoor attempt to hold back employee mobility.
As we've discussed for many years, a huge part of the reason for the success of Silicon Valley in dominating the innovation world has to do with the ease of employee mobility. Repeated studies have shown that the fact that employees can switch jobs easily, or start their own companies easily, is a key factor in driving innovation forward. It's the sharing and interplay of ideas that allows the entire industry to tackle big problems. Individual firms may compete around those big breakthroughs, but it's the combined knowledge, ideas, and perspective sharing that results in the big breakthroughs.
And even though that's widely known, tech companies have an unfortunate history of trying to stop employees from going to competitors. While non-competes have been ruled out in California, a few years back there was a big scandal over tech companies having illegal handshake agreements not to poach employees from one another. It was a good thing to see the companies fined for such practices.
However, the latest move is to use "trade secrets" claims as way to effectively get the same thing done. The mere threat of lawsuits can stop companies from hiring employees, and can limit an employee's ability to find a new job somewhere else. That should concern us all.
However, in this lawsuit, everything was turned a bit upside down. Part of it was that there did appear to be some outrageous behavior by Levandowski. Part of it was that, frankly, there are few companies out there disliked as much as Uber. It does seem that if it were almost any other company on the planet, many more people would have been rooting against Google as the big incumbent suing a smaller competitor. But, in this case, many many people seemed to be rooting for Google out of a general dislike of Uber itself.
My own fear was that this general idea of "Uber = bad" combined with "Levandowski doing sketchy things" could lead to a bad ruling which would then be used to limit employee mobility in much more sympathetic settings. Thankfully, that seems unlikely to happen. As Sarah Jeong (who's coverage of this case was absolutely worth following) noted, despite all the rhetoric, it wasn't at all clear that Waymo proved its case. Lots of people wanted Google/Waymo to win for emotional reasons, but the legal evidence wasn't clearly there.
And now the case is over. As the trial was set to continue Friday morning, it was announced that the two parties had reached a settlement, in which Uber basically hands over a small chunk of equity to Waymo (less than Waymo first tried to get, but still significant). As Jeong notes in another article, both sides had ample reasons to settle -- but the best reason of all to settle is so that they can focus on just competing in the market, rather than the courtroom and in not setting bad and dangerous precedent concerning employee mobility in an industry where that's vital.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: anthony levendowski, autonomous vehicles, competition, employee mobility, innovation, patents, self driving cars, settlement, trade secrets, travis kalanik
Companies: google, otto, uber, waymo
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Trade Secrets = Bad?
Trademarks, patents and copyright have been traditionally used to control IP:
Yet trade secrets have crept into the nomenclature. While the traditional three have some concept of fixedness in their implementations, trade secrets seem to be anything someone wants them to be. While patents (for example) require a particular implementation of a concept, trade secrets do not seem to have the same burden. They seem to cover ideas rather than implementations. Something that should not be a part of such systems, otherwise one would not be able to make something that competes with any patent, no matter how much their implementation differs from the patent holders implementation.
Trade secrets should at least be drastically limited. They should not include knowledge developed by an emplyee who then chooses to work for a different company, even if the result of that knowledge is some patent-able product. The patent would remain with the original company, but the concepts that would allow for a new patent, with a different implementation should be allowed to travel with the individual.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Trade Secrets = Bad?
With copyright, the public offers a temporary monopoly in order to encourage the public release of the material; in exchange for this, when the monopoly expires, the public gets the material in the public domain. (In theory.)
With patents, the picture is much the same, except that - while the scope of what can be patented has stretched out of all recognition and reasonability - the terms have remained within mostly-reasonable limits.
With trade secrets... what does the public get, in exchange for enforcing the keeping-secret of these things? The information never gets released, and the only way it benefits the public is by way of the fact that the public can buy the product or service from the company - which it could do anyway, even if the secret thing were not secret. As far as I can see, the companies benefit from having these things remain secret, and the public gets nothing out of the deal.
If you don't want to register a copyright, or file for a patent, or any of the other myriad facets of public-disclosure-in-exchange-for-temporary-protection intellectual-property law which have been come up with over the decades, why should the public be restricted from doing whatever it wants with the information if it can get its hands on that information?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
YOU complained at the delay: "Justice Department Jumps In, Unprompted", as if the judge hadn't alerted to crimes, implying it was bad, and you're STILL dismissing it because "never actually came up at the trial"?
Wow, you cheer crimes even when against Google! I suppose that's a degree of consistency...
... by taking company secrets and starting a competitor without those pesky "fixed (or sunk) costs", which is ILLEGAL AND CRIMINAL, with indictments for the latter SURE TO COME.
Clearly Uber was going to lose, and clearly you still love criminal Uber, even after it's exposed for sexist, anti-competitive, anti-union, spy apps to dodge laws, its CEO an arrogant anti-employee, AND is subsidizing about 30 percent of every ride, it's yet to make a profit, is STILL burning "venture capital"!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: YOU complained at the delay: "Justice Department Jumps In, Unprompted", as if the judge hadn't alerted to crimes, implying it was bad, and you're STILL dismissing it because "never actually came up at the trial"?
Whoops. Meant to quote from the "can't compete" piece in which you ignore all "sunk (or fixed) costs" for a $100 million dollar movie so that you can claim bandwidth is the only cost.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: YOU complained at the delay: "Justice Department Jumps In, Unprompted", as if the judge hadn't alerted to crimes, implying it was bad, and you're STILL dismissing it because "never actually came up at the trial"?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Breach of trade secrets should be met with the official response of "Tough shit, should have registered it for everyone's benefit instead of trying to keep a secret over a long period of time with a growing business and a transient workforce!" Trade secrets should receive no recognition legally.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
It's not just Uber = Bad
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]