Uber, in response to a lawsuit filed by Google parent company Alphabet, today filed an opposition that says the company effectively doesn’t have any of the documents Alphabet claims were stolen.
Uber says it doesn’t have the files that Google parent company Alphabet says were stolen
The company further says that an injunction isn’t necessary because all the cars on the road are using Velodyne lidar.
More specifically, after conducting a search, Uber argues the files never touched its servers.
The ride-hailing giant is facing a lawsuit from Alphabet, which claims one of Uber’s executives stole proprietary information on a key piece of self-driving technology known as lidar, a laser-based system for navigating streets.
Alphabet says the Uber executive, Anthony Levandowski, a former Alphabet employee, stole 14,000 files to help Uber develop its own self-driving system.
“Both of its central premises — that former Waymo employees brought thousands of confidential Waymo documents to Uber to build a copycat LiDAR and that Uber’s LiDAR closely mimics Waymo’s single-lens design — are demonstrably false,” Uber said in today’s filing. Alphabet’s self-driving division is now called Waymo.
Levandowski is now the head of Uber’s self-driving department. That’s why Alphabet is concerned that the designs for a key sensor technology Levandowski allegedly stole have made its way into the company’s autonomous vehicles.
Alphabet responded that Uber hasn’t properly made a search for the stolen files. “Uber’s assertion that they’ve never touched the 14,000 stolen files is disingenuous at best, given their refusal to look in the most obvious place: The computers and devices owned by the head of their self-driving program,” a Waymo spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
Alphabet has requested an injunction, which, if granted, could force Uber to cease most of its self-driving operations. The next hearing is scheduled for May 3.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
By Theodore Schleifer
By Johana Bhuiyan
