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This judge is mighty impressive, and since it's so much in fashion these days to be suspicious of institutions, I want to highlight this passage: THE COURT: If

This judge is mighty impressive, and since it's so much in fashion these days to be suspicious of institutions, I want to highlight this passage: THE COURT: If you all keep insisting on redacting so much information, like -- and you're the guilty one on that, Mr. Verhoeven -- then arbitration looks better and better. Because I'm not going to put up with it. If we're going to be in a public proceeding, 99 percent of what -- 90 percent, anyway, has got to be public. [..] THE COURT: The best thing -- if we were -- one of the factors that you ought to be considering is maybe you should -- if you want all this stuff to be so secret, you should be in arbitration. You shouldn't be trying to do this in court and constantly telling them not to, or you putting in -- the public has a right to see what we do. [..] And I feel that so strongly. I am not -- the U.S. District Court is not a wholly owned subsidiary of Quinn Emanuel or Morrison & Foerster or these two big companies. We belong to the public. And if this continues, then several things are going to happen. One, we're going to call a halt to the whole -- we're going to stop everything. And we're going to have document-by-document hearings in this room,

life_on_mars 10y ago
So from what I understand, Google is litigating this in public, but their lawyers, such as Mr. Verhoeven, are redacting everything on their side they don't want public. This makes it sound like Google is doing this in public mainly to hurt Uber as much as possible in the court of public opinion. Am I wrong in interpreting Google's actions this way? Sounds like this and many other conflicts Google had with Mr. Lewandowsky over the years should have been dealt with in arbitration. This just looks like Google acting out a vendetta against Mr. Lewandowsky. They tolerated his actions when he worked for them and even after he left to work for himself, but turned against him once he joined a competitor. While on paper, it doesn't appear that Mr. Lewandowsky is a saint, Google doesn't look good here either. Google's behavior here should give any engineer pause about considering Google as a place to work. California doesn't allow non-compete agreements, and this looks like Google attempting to achieve the effects of a non-compete through litigation. "If we can't hire and keep Mr. Lewandowsky, then we'll make sure our competitors can't either."
- hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
  A vendetta against Mr. Levandowski? Google paid him $120 million, and he then took that same technology for another multi hundred million dollar payday from Uber. Mr. Levandowski's avarice is basically something I can't really comprehend.
  - life_on_mars2 10y ago
    I can't find the article that I read that talked about Mr Levandowski's experience prior to Google and while at Google, but the impression I got wasn't that he left out of avarice, but because Google was too bureaucratic for his taste. His entire career looks like someone eager to build the future today, and it sounds like Google failed to be an enabler of what he wants to build. The more I read about Uber, the more I get the impression that it's the best place to work today if you actually want to build the future fast. Plus, getting a second big payday may not have even mattered to him, but it would have mattered to all the other Otto employees. Everyone here is quick to assume malice when it might just be incompetence of one form or another.
    - lovich 10y ago
      It'd be a lot easier to believe he only had noble goals if he didnt get multiple 9 figure pay days out of it.
    - hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
      > The more I read about Uber, the more I get the impression that it's the best place to work today if you actually want to build the future fast. Is there some sort of bizarro universe version of Hacker News that has been publishing "Uber is an awesome place to work!" articles?
- dlgeek 10y ago
  > So from what I understand, Google is litigating this in public, but their lawyers, such as Mr. Verhoeven, are redacting everything on their side they don't want public. This makes it sound like Google is doing this in public mainly to hurt Uber as much as possible in the court of public opinion. Am I wrong in interpreting Google's actions this way? If you keep reading, they touch on that several times. It sounds like Uber's lawyers complained to the judge and Google complained "Hey, you didn't ask us first" and then the judge yelled at Uber. It's complicated by the fact that there are multiple suits going on, both the public lawsuit and some sort of arbitration, and Google has different lawyers representing them for the others. In the end of the transcript of the session the quote is from, Google was saying they were only trying to redact sensitive PII in the employment agreement (the document that they were arguing about) like name, address, salary, etc. and everyone was OK with that.
dlgeek 10y ago
Also check out this order: https://ia601504.us.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.cand.308136/gov.uscourts.cand.308136.120.0.pdf https://ia601504.us.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.cand.30... "[...] the Court first states its strong concern that the memorandum in support of the motion to compel is overly redacted. Our federal courts belong to the public, and the public and the press have a legitimate interest in looking over our shoulders to see the work in progress in our courts. The essence of our work concerns evaluating competing arguments. Parties should not hide those arguments under seal out of a desire to shroud business dealings in secrecy. [...] This theme runs throughout the brief history of this case. Please do not claim privacy over anything less than true trade secrets or other material clearly deserving to be under seal."

life_on_mars 10y ago

So from what I understand, Google is litigating this in public, but their lawyers, such as Mr. Verhoeven, are redacting everything on their side they don't want public. This makes it sound like Google is doing this in public mainly to hurt Uber as much as possible in the court of public opinion. Am I wrong in interpreting Google's actions this way? Sounds like this and many other conflicts Google had with Mr. Lewandowsky over the years should have been dealt with in arbitration. This just looks like Google acting out a vendetta against Mr. Lewandowsky. They tolerated his actions when he worked for them and even after he left to work for himself, but turned against him once he joined a competitor. While on paper, it doesn't appear that Mr. Lewandowsky is a saint, Google doesn't look good here either. Google's behavior here should give any engineer pause about considering Google as a place to work. California doesn't allow non-compete agreements, and this looks like Google attempting to achieve the effects of a non-compete through litigation. "If we can't hire and keep Mr. Lewandowsky, then we'll make sure our competitors can't either."

hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
A vendetta against Mr. Levandowski? Google paid him $120 million, and he then took that same technology for another multi hundred million dollar payday from Uber. Mr. Levandowski's avarice is basically something I can't really comprehend.
- life_on_mars2 10y ago
  I can't find the article that I read that talked about Mr Levandowski's experience prior to Google and while at Google, but the impression I got wasn't that he left out of avarice, but because Google was too bureaucratic for his taste. His entire career looks like someone eager to build the future today, and it sounds like Google failed to be an enabler of what he wants to build. The more I read about Uber, the more I get the impression that it's the best place to work today if you actually want to build the future fast. Plus, getting a second big payday may not have even mattered to him, but it would have mattered to all the other Otto employees. Everyone here is quick to assume malice when it might just be incompetence of one form or another.
  - lovich 10y ago
    It'd be a lot easier to believe he only had noble goals if he didnt get multiple 9 figure pay days out of it.
  - hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
    > The more I read about Uber, the more I get the impression that it's the best place to work today if you actually want to build the future fast. Is there some sort of bizarro universe version of Hacker News that has been publishing "Uber is an awesome place to work!" articles?
dlgeek 10y ago
> So from what I understand, Google is litigating this in public, but their lawyers, such as Mr. Verhoeven, are redacting everything on their side they don't want public. This makes it sound like Google is doing this in public mainly to hurt Uber as much as possible in the court of public opinion. Am I wrong in interpreting Google's actions this way? If you keep reading, they touch on that several times. It sounds like Uber's lawyers complained to the judge and Google complained "Hey, you didn't ask us first" and then the judge yelled at Uber. It's complicated by the fact that there are multiple suits going on, both the public lawsuit and some sort of arbitration, and Google has different lawyers representing them for the others. In the end of the transcript of the session the quote is from, Google was saying they were only trying to redact sensitive PII in the employment agreement (the document that they were arguing about) like name, address, salary, etc. and everyone was OK with that.

dlgeek 10y ago

Also check out this order: https://ia601504.us.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.cand.308136/gov.uscourts.cand.308136.120.0.pdf https://ia601504.us.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.cand.30... "[...] the Court first states its strong concern that the memorandum in support of the motion to compel is overly redacted. Our federal courts belong to the public, and the public and the press have a legitimate interest in looking over our shoulders to see the work in progress in our courts. The essence of our work concerns evaluating competing arguments. Parties should not hide those arguments under seal out of a desire to shroud business dealings in secrecy. [...] This theme runs throughout the brief history of this case. Please do not claim privacy over anything less than true trade secrets or other material clearly deserving to be under seal."