7 ms·

Who is Anthony Levandowski, and why is Google suing him?

98 points by defenestration 10y ago

coldcode 10y ago
Move fast and break things has interesting side effects. If in fact you can prove he took documents, not just what was in his brain, then likely Google will win as that law is fairly obvious. If you can't, what knowledge he knows that he took with him is much more difficult to prove as "stolen".
- geofft 10y ago
  Here's the post by Waymo: https://medium.com/waymo/a-note-on-our-lawsuit-against-otto-and-uber-86f4f98902a1 https://medium.com/waymo/a-note-on-our-lawsuit-against-otto-... > Recently, we received an unexpected email. One of our suppliers specializing in LiDAR components sent us an attachment (apparently inadvertently) of machine drawings of what was purported to be Uber’s LiDAR circuit board — except its design bore a striking resemblance to Waymo’s unique LiDAR design. > We found that six weeks before his resignation this former employee, Anthony Levandowski, downloaded over 14,000 highly confidential and proprietary design files for Waymo’s various hardware systems, including designs of Waymo’s LiDAR and circuit board. To gain access to Waymo’s design server, Mr. Levandowski searched for and installed specialized software onto his company-issued laptop. Once inside, he downloaded 9.7 GB of Waymo’s highly confidential files and trade secrets, including blueprints, design files and testing documentation. Then he connected an external drive to the laptop. Mr. Levandowski then wiped and reformatted the laptop in an attempt to erase forensic fingerprints. The full legal complaint is at the bottom of that post. It doesn't say how Waymo detected it, but presumably they have internal IT logs. The claim is not about anything in his brain.
  - disposableteen2 10y ago
    Did they reconstruct this from the server logs or were they monitoring his laptop in real time?
    - packetized 10y ago
      Most likely both.
    - mc32 10y ago
      They probably have all kind of activity meta data on all emps but don't actively monitor and only go back and reconstruct in these kinds of events (leaks, IP disputes, emp misconduct, etc.)
    - rodgerd 10y ago
      They won't have been monitoring his laptop. They will have been monitoring the Google laptop he used. It's an important distinction people are well-advised to remember.
dboreham 10y ago
Presumably they can cite the decision in Hooil vs. Pied Piper
- ivraatiems 10y ago
  Sadly, that case went to arbitration, so they cannot. But I definitely think this article is giving me a better understanding of Google's D2F ratio... ;)
- DannyBee 10y ago
  Humorously, when we were going over the scenario, I told them the case would have been miserably lost by Richard, but since Richard had to win, I had to help them come up with a way that was at least not-truly-terrible (and fix the dialogue :P) But they actually had a completely written legal complaint and everything.
  - dboreham 10y ago
    Your work is appreciated. Watching that episode originally my thinking was "surely nobody experienced in the business would be unaware of how to behave and act to avoid future IP lawsuits", but I guess this real-life case proves otherwise..
joshu 10y ago
Strangely the article deletes Sebastian Thrun's roll. Shitty journalism.
- MegaButts 10y ago
  Sebastian Thrun left Google 3 years ago, and had already been splitting his time between Google and Udacity 5 years ago. The article is talking about the recent events leading up to a lawsuit, not the history of self-driving cars (in which case we'd have to go back to the 80's and Carnegie Mellon, where coincidentally Sebastian Thrun once worked as a researcher).
  - joshu 10y ago
    It paints levandowski as the origin of google's program, and X predating the program as well, neither of which are true.
username223 10y ago
> He also found a lobbyist and got involved in getting laws passed in Nevada and California to allow the testing of autonomous vehicles. His backroom lobbying did not endear him to some executives at Google. > “I thought you could just do it yourself,” he said. “Then I found out that there is a team dedicated to that, a process. Got a little bit in trouble for doing it.” Wow. What world is this guy living in, where he thought he should personally hire a lobbyist to change some laws to make his job easier? Maybe it's the difference between me and a 10x-er, but I just don't understand this.
- hyperbovine 10y ago
  > Q: How are ultra-high-net-worth individuals different from run-of-the-mill affluent individuals? > A: They have this feeling that rules don’t apply to them, although that mind-set is often the key to much of their success. If they’re told something can’t be done a certain way, they think that doesn’t apply to them and find a way around it. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/your-money/inside-the-minds-of-the-ultrawealthy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/your-money/inside-the-min...
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    This explains so much of Silicon Valley and the tendency to try to circumvent or avoid regulations at any cost, like for ride sharing, AirBnB, etc.
- rmason 10y ago
  The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. I think this George Bernard Shaw quote pretty much explains the guy. Is he naive or is Google overreaching? Going to be interesting watching this one play out.
  - jb613 10y ago
    "Going to be interesting watching this one play out." I suspect, access of "14,000 highly confidential and proprietary files shortly before his resignation" will play a major role in swaying the deciders. Experience tells us that not all of those 14k were critical, what if it had be 1 or 2 critical design docs? In a different or future case, we may see that happen. Corps have incentive to reduce competitors, but now may start recognizing the potential leverage they have - "Our network logs show Joe accessed our main design doc 1 week before he left for company doing similar work!".
jsjohnst 10y ago
The actual complaint [0] filed February 23rd is extremely thorough and very damning. Somehow I'm not shocked. [0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7dzPLynxaXuQjY3dkllZ2ZKb0k/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7dzPLynxaXuQjY3dkllZ2ZKb0k...
imh 10y ago
>“Google was very supportive, but they absolutely did not want their name associated with a vehicle driving in San Francisco,” he said. “They were worried about an engineer building a self-driving car that kills someone and it gets back to Google.” In what possible world is that a bad thing to worry about?!
- empath75 10y ago
  In a word in which self driving cars are safer than human drivers, presumably.
SNBasti 10y ago
Just curious, is he related to the football player Robert Levandowski from FC Bayern ? :)
- kkleindev 10y ago
  It's Robert Lewandowski
fffernan 10y ago
He should go to jail. The state of California should prosecute him.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
Such an interesting case to watch from the outside. Clearly the guy did not realize that Google spends inordinate amount of resources watching their own employees. When I was there, a couple of laptops were stolen from HQ and the amount, and detail, of the laptops they had (location beacons, video footage from dozens of cameras, and RAT like tools on the laptops themselves) let them capture the crooks, recover the laptops, and identify the contractor who had assisted in access to the building in something like a few hours after they were reported stolen. I was really impressed by that, it certainly let anyone who was thinking about it know just how silly it would be to try to do something counter to the company's interests. But this comment, "At Google, Levandowski said, he was always chafing at the slow pace of progress. He finally left the company in January 2016, a month after Waymo alleges he had downloaded the technical files, and within days had formed a new company, 280 Systems, which Waymo claims became Otto." I find perhaps the most interesting. I can say a lot of things about Google but 'slow' is not something that generally came to mind. So that is surprising. And then there is what this guy put at risk, there is this comment: "After covering his tracks, the lawsuit alleges, Levandowski pocketed a multimillion-dollar payout from Google and, using the secrets he had just stolen, promptly set up a new company, Otto, which was acquired shortly after by Uber for around $680m." Presumably, as part of the acquisition he was signing that he wasn't infringing on any previous agreements by joining and that he had rights to the material in question. And so if this goes against him, it seems Google will have cause to get back their payouts, and Uber will have cause to get back the $680M they paid too. And perhaps a huge chunk of that will come out of his own net worth. Maybe he squirreled away a bunch of cash that he thinks is out of reach of the IRS/Courts but really? Going to be interesting indeed.
- rodgerd 10y ago
  > I can say a lot of things about Google but 'slow' is not something that generally came to mind. So that is surprising. Perhaps Google's preference for not having their autonomous vehicles driving under trucks or running around San Francisco recklessly chafed at him.
- spaceflunky 10y ago
  What will be fascinating to watch is how justice is served here. Regardless of the wrong Levandowski may have committed, he is still an extremely talented engineer in a field where a 'space race' of sorts is going on between a handful of heavily monied-up players. On one hand, I think Waymo has ability to financial ruin Levandowski. On the other hand, no matter how tainted he is by this scandal, there are still 10 other players in this field who would be willing to pay him a huge salary. So he could easily get a multi-million dollar salary from someone else. I suppose what could happen is that other companies would be unwilling to work with Levandowski because if a new employer of Levandowski's happens to develop technology similar to Waymo's, Waymo could sue the new company and say the new company received Waymo's proprietary information from Levandowski. Even if that didn't happened, Levandowskis presence is enough to prove otherwise. In other words, just the presence of Levandowski in another self-driving car project is huge legal liability. And that may be his downfall. It is, however, sad to think that this technology could be set back a few years because of Levandowski's actions.
vinchuco 10y ago
>The engineer made Google a world leader in self-driving cars. Now the company is accusing him of stealing its secrets and taking them to Uber Oh. OK. The title is not too informative and sort of clickbaity.
mingyeow 10y ago
I am actually sincerely curious - is this considered a felony if proven? Seems like a major offense to steal such a massive amount of information blatantly for self enrichment, even if done under the missive of "changing the world" This cannot end well.
- isubkhankulov 10y ago
  The suit is a civil tort, seeking damages. A felony is a criminal charge, usually against a person. I'm sure Google can call the CA District attorney and/or the western US district attorney to make a criminal complaint, State and Federal, respectively. I'm not an expert on the actual criminal charges available on each level but probably something about trade secrets if we're talking federal charges.
- coolgeek 10y ago
  Some info about criminal penalties under UTSA and DTSA here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret#United_States I think that DTSA may not hold here because it wasn't signed until the events occurred. I went looking into this after a comment from Animats in yesterday's thread struck me as odd https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719070
- tracker1 10y ago
  git clone REPO_NAME It really depends on the specifics of the case... the above could easily download 14K documents (necessary for doing work by said employee) a full 6 weeks before leaving the company.
dclowd9901 10y ago
One thing I hadn't thought of til just now: how was he able to start a company in a competing market right after leaving google?
- denimnerd 10y ago
  California's laws don't prohibit it.
jb613 10y ago
What concerns me is that we are going to see more and more of this in the coming years - corporations concerned over ex-employees taking their knowledge with them and taking legal recourse. In this case, they complain about access of 14k proprietary files - which is pretty damning, but I could see similar damning evidence over accessing a couple of critically important design docs relatively near the end of employment. How do you distinguish between files being accessed merely for the purpose out your work vs theft? How can you ascertain what was in their minds and hearts for accessing for those files - and worse, how little would it take to sway a judge or jury that accessing of such files were deliberate (ie part of the bigger picture)? Courts have been wrong before. Previous generations this didn't come up because they stayed in 1 or 2 jobs their entire lives, at least in this aspect, today's environment is completely different.

Move fast and break things has interesting side effects. If in fact you can prove he took documents, not just what was in his brain, then likely Google will win as that law is fairly obvious. If you can't, what knowledge he knows that he took with him is much more difficult to prove as "stolen".

geofft 10y ago
Here's the post by Waymo: https://medium.com/waymo/a-note-on-our-lawsuit-against-otto-and-uber-86f4f98902a1 https://medium.com/waymo/a-note-on-our-lawsuit-against-otto-... > Recently, we received an unexpected email. One of our suppliers specializing in LiDAR components sent us an attachment (apparently inadvertently) of machine drawings of what was purported to be Uber’s LiDAR circuit board — except its design bore a striking resemblance to Waymo’s unique LiDAR design. > We found that six weeks before his resignation this former employee, Anthony Levandowski, downloaded over 14,000 highly confidential and proprietary design files for Waymo’s various hardware systems, including designs of Waymo’s LiDAR and circuit board. To gain access to Waymo’s design server, Mr. Levandowski searched for and installed specialized software onto his company-issued laptop. Once inside, he downloaded 9.7 GB of Waymo’s highly confidential files and trade secrets, including blueprints, design files and testing documentation. Then he connected an external drive to the laptop. Mr. Levandowski then wiped and reformatted the laptop in an attempt to erase forensic fingerprints. The full legal complaint is at the bottom of that post. It doesn't say how Waymo detected it, but presumably they have internal IT logs. The claim is not about anything in his brain.
- disposableteen2 10y ago
  Did they reconstruct this from the server logs or were they monitoring his laptop in real time?
  - packetized 10y ago
    Most likely both.
  - mc32 10y ago
    They probably have all kind of activity meta data on all emps but don't actively monitor and only go back and reconstruct in these kinds of events (leaks, IP disputes, emp misconduct, etc.)
  - rodgerd 10y ago
    They won't have been monitoring his laptop. They will have been monitoring the Google laptop he used. It's an important distinction people are well-advised to remember.

dboreham 10y ago

Presumably they can cite the decision in Hooil vs. Pied Piper

ivraatiems 10y ago
Sadly, that case went to arbitration, so they cannot. But I definitely think this article is giving me a better understanding of Google's D2F ratio... ;)
DannyBee 10y ago
Humorously, when we were going over the scenario, I told them the case would have been miserably lost by Richard, but since Richard had to win, I had to help them come up with a way that was at least not-truly-terrible (and fix the dialogue :P) But they actually had a completely written legal complaint and everything.
- dboreham 10y ago
  Your work is appreciated. Watching that episode originally my thinking was "surely nobody experienced in the business would be unaware of how to behave and act to avoid future IP lawsuits", but I guess this real-life case proves otherwise..

joshu 10y ago

Strangely the article deletes Sebastian Thrun's roll. Shitty journalism.

MegaButts 10y ago
Sebastian Thrun left Google 3 years ago, and had already been splitting his time between Google and Udacity 5 years ago. The article is talking about the recent events leading up to a lawsuit, not the history of self-driving cars (in which case we'd have to go back to the 80's and Carnegie Mellon, where coincidentally Sebastian Thrun once worked as a researcher).
- joshu 10y ago
  It paints levandowski as the origin of google's program, and X predating the program as well, neither of which are true.

username223 10y ago

> He also found a lobbyist and got involved in getting laws passed in Nevada and California to allow the testing of autonomous vehicles. His backroom lobbying did not endear him to some executives at Google. > “I thought you could just do it yourself,” he said. “Then I found out that there is a team dedicated to that, a process. Got a little bit in trouble for doing it.” Wow. What world is this guy living in, where he thought he should personally hire a lobbyist to change some laws to make his job easier? Maybe it's the difference between me and a 10x-er, but I just don't understand this.

hyperbovine 10y ago
> Q: How are ultra-high-net-worth individuals different from run-of-the-mill affluent individuals? > A: They have this feeling that rules don’t apply to them, although that mind-set is often the key to much of their success. If they’re told something can’t be done a certain way, they think that doesn’t apply to them and find a way around it. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/your-money/inside-the-minds-of-the-ultrawealthy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/your-money/inside-the-min...
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  This explains so much of Silicon Valley and the tendency to try to circumvent or avoid regulations at any cost, like for ride sharing, AirBnB, etc.
rmason 10y ago
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. I think this George Bernard Shaw quote pretty much explains the guy. Is he naive or is Google overreaching? Going to be interesting watching this one play out.
- jb613 10y ago
  "Going to be interesting watching this one play out." I suspect, access of "14,000 highly confidential and proprietary files shortly before his resignation" will play a major role in swaying the deciders. Experience tells us that not all of those 14k were critical, what if it had be 1 or 2 critical design docs? In a different or future case, we may see that happen. Corps have incentive to reduce competitors, but now may start recognizing the potential leverage they have - "Our network logs show Joe accessed our main design doc 1 week before he left for company doing similar work!".

jsjohnst 10y ago

The actual complaint [0] filed February 23rd is extremely thorough and very damning. Somehow I'm not shocked. [0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7dzPLynxaXuQjY3dkllZ2ZKb0k/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7dzPLynxaXuQjY3dkllZ2ZKb0k...

imh 10y ago

>“Google was very supportive, but they absolutely did not want their name associated with a vehicle driving in San Francisco,” he said. “They were worried about an engineer building a self-driving car that kills someone and it gets back to Google.” In what possible world is that a bad thing to worry about?!

empath75 10y ago
In a word in which self driving cars are safer than human drivers, presumably.

SNBasti 10y ago

Just curious, is he related to the football player Robert Levandowski from FC Bayern ? :)

kkleindev 10y ago
It's Robert Lewandowski

fffernan 10y ago

He should go to jail. The state of California should prosecute him.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

Such an interesting case to watch from the outside. Clearly the guy did not realize that Google spends inordinate amount of resources watching their own employees. When I was there, a couple of laptops were stolen from HQ and the amount, and detail, of the laptops they had (location beacons, video footage from dozens of cameras, and RAT like tools on the laptops themselves) let them capture the crooks, recover the laptops, and identify the contractor who had assisted in access to the building in something like a few hours after they were reported stolen. I was really impressed by that, it certainly let anyone who was thinking about it know just how silly it would be to try to do something counter to the company's interests. But this comment, "At Google, Levandowski said, he was always chafing at the slow pace of progress. He finally left the company in January 2016, a month after Waymo alleges he had downloaded the technical files, and within days had formed a new company, 280 Systems, which Waymo claims became Otto." I find perhaps the most interesting. I can say a lot of things about Google but 'slow' is not something that generally came to mind. So that is surprising. And then there is what this guy put at risk, there is this comment: "After covering his tracks, the lawsuit alleges, Levandowski pocketed a multimillion-dollar payout from Google and, using the secrets he had just stolen, promptly set up a new company, Otto, which was acquired shortly after by Uber for around $680m." Presumably, as part of the acquisition he was signing that he wasn't infringing on any previous agreements by joining and that he had rights to the material in question. And so if this goes against him, it seems Google will have cause to get back their payouts, and Uber will have cause to get back the $680M they paid too. And perhaps a huge chunk of that will come out of his own net worth. Maybe he squirreled away a bunch of cash that he thinks is out of reach of the IRS/Courts but really? Going to be interesting indeed.

rodgerd 10y ago
> I can say a lot of things about Google but 'slow' is not something that generally came to mind. So that is surprising. Perhaps Google's preference for not having their autonomous vehicles driving under trucks or running around San Francisco recklessly chafed at him.
spaceflunky 10y ago
What will be fascinating to watch is how justice is served here. Regardless of the wrong Levandowski may have committed, he is still an extremely talented engineer in a field where a 'space race' of sorts is going on between a handful of heavily monied-up players. On one hand, I think Waymo has ability to financial ruin Levandowski. On the other hand, no matter how tainted he is by this scandal, there are still 10 other players in this field who would be willing to pay him a huge salary. So he could easily get a multi-million dollar salary from someone else. I suppose what could happen is that other companies would be unwilling to work with Levandowski because if a new employer of Levandowski's happens to develop technology similar to Waymo's, Waymo could sue the new company and say the new company received Waymo's proprietary information from Levandowski. Even if that didn't happened, Levandowskis presence is enough to prove otherwise. In other words, just the presence of Levandowski in another self-driving car project is huge legal liability. And that may be his downfall. It is, however, sad to think that this technology could be set back a few years because of Levandowski's actions.

vinchuco 10y ago

>The engineer made Google a world leader in self-driving cars. Now the company is accusing him of stealing its secrets and taking them to Uber Oh. OK. The title is not too informative and sort of clickbaity.

mingyeow 10y ago

I am actually sincerely curious - is this considered a felony if proven? Seems like a major offense to steal such a massive amount of information blatantly for self enrichment, even if done under the missive of "changing the world" This cannot end well.

isubkhankulov 10y ago
The suit is a civil tort, seeking damages. A felony is a criminal charge, usually against a person. I'm sure Google can call the CA District attorney and/or the western US district attorney to make a criminal complaint, State and Federal, respectively. I'm not an expert on the actual criminal charges available on each level but probably something about trade secrets if we're talking federal charges.
coolgeek 10y ago
Some info about criminal penalties under UTSA and DTSA here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret#United_States I think that DTSA may not hold here because it wasn't signed until the events occurred. I went looking into this after a comment from Animats in yesterday's thread struck me as odd https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719070
tracker1 10y ago
git clone REPO_NAME It really depends on the specifics of the case... the above could easily download 14K documents (necessary for doing work by said employee) a full 6 weeks before leaving the company.

dclowd9901 10y ago

One thing I hadn't thought of til just now: how was he able to start a company in a competing market right after leaving google?

denimnerd 10y ago
California's laws don't prohibit it.

jb613 10y ago

What concerns me is that we are going to see more and more of this in the coming years - corporations concerned over ex-employees taking their knowledge with them and taking legal recourse. In this case, they complain about access of 14k proprietary files - which is pretty damning, but I could see similar damning evidence over accessing a couple of critically important design docs relatively near the end of employment. How do you distinguish between files being accessed merely for the purpose out your work vs theft? How can you ascertain what was in their minds and hearts for accessing for those files - and worse, how little would it take to sway a judge or jury that accessing of such files were deliberate (ie part of the bigger picture)? Courts have been wrong before. Previous generations this didn't come up because they stayed in 1 or 2 jobs their entire lives, at least in this aspect, today's environment is completely different.