As you might have heard, Alphabet’s Waymo recently filed a lawsuit against Uber alleging that the company was using “stolen” technology for their self-driving car efforts, and as if the lawsuit wasn’t enough, a report from The Verge has revealed that Waymo has recently asked the courts to block Uber from operating their self-driving vehicles.
For those unfamiliar with the case, a former engineer that was part of Google’s self-driving car team left and created a company called Otto that created self-driving trucks, which was subsequently acquired by Uber. However the company is alleging that before the engineer had left, he had “stolen” confidential files regarding self-driving technology that they believe is currently being used by Uber in their self-driving efforts.
Waymo also filed the sworn testimony of a former forensic security engineer at Google, Gary Brown, who testified that there was evidence that Otto’s Anthony Levandowski had indeed accessed and downloaded the confidential files. Uber had previously responded to Waymo’s allegations by calling them “baseless”.
The company had also recently obtained the necessary permits to operate their self-driving cars in the state of California. We can only assume that Uber will continue to fight these allegations, but we’ll keep our eyes peeled for more updates in the future as the lawsuit progresses.
Filed in . Read more about Legal, Self-Driving Cars, Uber and Waymo.