Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Levandowski Arrested, Charged With Selling Waymo Autonomous Vehicle Trade Secrets to Uber (GOOG; UBER)

We followed the civil trial of Waymo LLC v. Uber Technologies, Inc. et al (Levandowski) and now it looks as though we're on to the criminal.
From CNBC:
Ex-Google engineer charged with taking trade secrets to Uber
  • The U.S. Department of Justice announced a criminal indictment against ex-Google engineer Anthony Levandowski.
  • Levandowski allegedly stole trade secrets from Google before going to Uber.
The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed Tuesday a criminal indictment against ex-Google engineer Anthony Levandowski.

The DOJ announced the 33 charges of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets at a press conference in San Jose, alleging Levandowski took confidential information from Google to Uber. Levandowski had worked at Google's self-driving car project which later became known as Waymo, but according to the indictment, he left in 2016 to launch his own self-driving truck company that was acquired by Uber.
Levandowski is scheduled to be arraigned on the charges Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time.

The indictment alleges Levandowski downloaded thousands of files from Waymo's predecessor, Project Chauffeur, in the months before he left Google. The files allegedly included "critical engineering information about the hardware used on Project Chauffeur self-driving vehicles," and that Levandowski transferred files onto his personal laptop....MORE
The blog has a few dozen posts on the skullduggery.
Here's one from August 2017:
The Third Rate Bromance of Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski (plus Elon Musk does a drive-by)

And the 'Search blog" results for "Levandowsi"