The Atlantic

A Doozy of a Lawsuit Over Self-Driving Cars

Waymo is suing Uber, and says a former employee stole nearly 10 gigabytes of secret files.
Source: Christian Charisius / Reuters

A stunning claim of stolen trade secrets may be the first big intellectual property battle of the self-driving car era.

Waymo, the self-driving car company that began at Google, is suing Uber and the self-driving truck company Otto, which Uber acquired last year. Waymo said in a federal lawsuit filed on Thursday that one of Google’s former software engineers, Anthony Levandowski, installed special software on his laptop so he could download more than 14,000 secret documents—totaling nearly 10 gigabytes of “highly confidential data”—from the company’s server when he still worked at Google. Waymo

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