The ongoing battle between Waymo and Uber, which reached its climax this week in a court in San Francisco, is partly due to a potential trillion pound battle
The future of self-driving dollars and the future that both companies have invested heavily in.
But at the heart of the dispute-
Uber has been charged with Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet-
Reflects a desire, incest, high with madness
They all call the Tech Valley home.
As long as Super Radical companies fight for a competitive advantage in Silicon Valley, usually with billions of dollars in shares, there are allegations of lost documents, suspicious hiring, plagiarized ideas and stolen business secrets.
For example: Apple vs Xerox in the 1970 s;
Over the past decade, Instagram has competed with Snapchat, Apple and Samsung.
Experts say it's not just the size of the companies involved that make the case stand out (
The total value of Uber and Waymo is over $100 billion)
But it is also possible to come up with influential names: Larry Page, CEO of Alphabet, the parent company of Google and Waymo, and Travis Kalanick, Uber's former chief executive.
Perhaps the biggest legal battle in the fledgling autonomous driving era would also be appropriate to ask jurors a shocking question: Uber
Billions-dollar ride-
Sharing platform-
When it hired an outstanding engineer who once led Google's self, he acted like any other technology company.
Driving a team before it split into Waymo?
Or is the company involved in an evil conspiracy involving multiple people stealing years of hard work-earned secrets?
The decision on Uber could force the company to strip autonomous technology from its fleet.
Driving vehicles, experts say.
The vehicles have been on the streets of Pittsburgh since 2016, and there have been some since.
In another industry, these types of conflicts may be considered isolated events.
But experts say high turnover and rapid innovation in Silicon Valley create distinctive cultural features that drive workers to stay the same in adapting to learning and re-creation.
Define where the company ends and workers begin
Who owns what's in their head?
According to Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, this may not be possible.
"It is difficult to draw a line between what the engineer himself gets and the company's property, which has been embedded in the product," he said . ".
"But the overflow of engineers working in a company who have gained valuable knowledge to work in another company is common in Silicon Valley and throughout the technical sector.
"The result is what Sundararajan calls" digital crossover
"It's an inevitable sharing of intellectual capital that researchers can track by mapping the flow of labor across companies.
When it comes to Waymo-
In the Uber case, jurors will have to decide whether to cross the numbers.
Pollination was carried out between the two companies, and if so, whether it was done in the case of evil.
Waymo accused Anthony Levandowski-
There was once a star engineer.
He stole 14,000 confidential documents from Google's parent company, where he worked as a senior engineer in driverless cars, trying to cover up his footprint.
The company claims that when Levandoski joined the company, the documents were used to help Uber and later run its own business. driving unit.
In January 2016, Levandowski left Google to start his own company.
Car start-
Uber later bought Otto for $0. 68 billion in August 2016.
Kalanick then appointed Levandoski as head of Uber.
Waymo claims that the driving plan is to steal their technology on purpose.
Waymo's lawyers may argue that the actions of engineers present an extreme case of unethical behavior, resulting in Waymo technology being directly injected into Uber's technology, where the company has developed so far,
"This is not an engineer accidentally from know-
"How to steal trade secrets because they don't know where the line is," a Waymo spokesperson said . ".
"The evidence shows that the rest of levandovsky and Uber deliberately stole Waymo's business secrets.
"If he takes action in the next few days, levandovsky, who was fired by Uber last year for refusing to cooperate with investigators related to the case, is expected to exercise his Fifth Amendment to himselfincrimination.
Although Uber claims no evidence from Waymo
Waymo claims that the schematic diagram, photos of the Uber device found during the discovery, and the testimony of Uber engineers prove this.
The juror's question is, does this evidence constitute a trade secret?
"Information that is generally known in the field, or that is well-versed in the technology when accused of theft, can easily be identified in an appropriate manner and cannot be characterized as a trade secret, "William, the federal judge who oversees the case, wrote in a draft jury instruction.
"There is no fixed standard to determine what is 'easily determined' in an appropriate way '.
"However, to recover what some have said is a loss of nearly $2 billion in money, Waymo lawyers must prove that Levandoski has not only stolen trade secrets, but that these so-called secrets are being used by Uber, and lead to "unjust enrichment", which is the defendant's measure of damages such as speeding up their development schedule or saving labor costs.
"The acquisition alone is not enough to recover the damages," the jury instructed . ".
The companies are likely to debate eight so-called trade secrets, which have been reduced from about 100 to another, which revolve around Uber circuit boards and lidar, a type
This may be a high demand for Waymo, who has only 16 hours to present the case to the jury, who is unlikely to be familiar with the complexity of automated vehicle engineering.
The time that can be used to present the evidence will eventually be used to educate the jurors about the said evidence.
After a year of devastating headlines involving multiple federal investigations and allegations of sexual harassment, Uber wants to avoid the trial becoming a referendum on the company's damaged reputation.
Even so, Uber officials say they are optimistic about the outcome of the trial.
If you can escape the trial unscathed, Uber's chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi can help the company get out of the history of the storm,
Sundararajan said Uber had been damaged regardless of the outcome of the trial.
"The lawsuit has been filed, which may have slowed Uber's plans for self-driving cars, got them involved in this extremely expensive lawsuit and increased doubts around the company, suggesting-
Regardless of the result
Waymo achieved the goal.