Mtn. View Firm Claims Uber Stole Driverless-Car Trade Secrets

SAN FRANCISCO – A three-week trial against Uber Technologies Inc. for alleged theft of trade secrets for driverless cars begins in federal court in San Francisco on Monday.

Mountain View-based Waymo LLC, a former subsidiary of Google, is seeking up to $1.8 billion in damages, according to a court filing, for alleged "unjust enrichment" by San Francisco-based Uber, the world's largest ride-booking company.

Waymo alleges that a former Google engineer who was hired and later fired by Uber stole secrets related to laser sensors that enable self-driving cars to identify their surroundings.

Uber claims in court papers that the allegations are "meritless" and "demonstrably false" and says its laser design is "fundamentally different."

The case will be decided by a 10-person civil jury in the court of U.S. District Judge William Alsup. The jurors were selected on Wednesday. The lawyers' opening statements and then testimony will begin in Alsup's Federal Building courtroom at 7:30 a.m. Monday.

Waymo was originally part of Google, which began a self-driving car project in 2009, and was spun off as a separate entity in 2016. It is now a subsidiary of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc.

Uber began hiring researchers and engineers for its own driverless car program in 2015.

Witnesses in the trial are slated to include Google co-founders Larry Page, who is now Alphabet's chief executive officer, and Sergey Brin; former Uber Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick; and Anthony Levandowski, the engineer who is alleged by Waymo to have stolen its trade secrets.

Levandowski is expected to invoke his Fifth Amendment right to refuse to testify, however.

Waymo alleges that Levandowski downloaded 14,000 files of highly confidential information in December 2015, shortly before he resigned in January 2016 and founded a self-driving truck company called Otto. Uber
acquired Otto in August 2016 for a reported $680 million and appointed Levandowski a vice-president in charge of its self-driving project.

Levandowski was fired by Uber in May, after he refused to cooperate with the company's internal investigation following the filing of the lawsuit by Waymo in February 2017.

The lawsuit claims Uber "leveraged stolen information" and misused Waymo's technology to develop its own system of laser sensors in a much shorter time than Waymo's seven years of research and development.

The laser technology is known as LiDAR, or Light Detection And Ranging. It uses high-frequency pulsing lasers to reflect off surrounding objects and send back data to create a three-dimensional picture of the
vehicle's environment.

Waymo alleges Uber misappropriated eight trade secrets related to the LiDAR technology.

Parts of the trial, including parts of Monday's opening statements, will be closed to the public to protect the trade secrets.

Pretrial proceedings before Alsup in the past year have featured numerous disputes in which Waymo claimed Uber delayed or avoided producing required documents. The case docket for the lawsuit contains more than 2,500 briefs, motions, documents and judicial orders.

In a pretrial ruling on Jan. 29, Alsup limited Waymo's ability to tell the jury about Uber's alleged delays, saying that claims of legal maneuvering by both sides should not be allowed to distract the jury from the
substance of the case.

"The central issue in this case remains whether or not Uber misappropriated Waymo's trade secrets, not whether or not Uber is an evil corporation," Alsup wrote.

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