14 ms·

Tesla sues former employees for allegedly stealing data, Autopilot source code

274 points by Element_ 8y ago

eastendguy 8y ago
Interesting. I thought Baidu and Alibaba are supposed to be leading AI companies. If so, why would XiaoPeng not partner with them?
ddoolin 8y ago
This might be unpopular here, but I kind of wish this and other similar systems were more open source, or even just shared between companies. If companies are going to be putting a system out there on the streets anyway, and Tesla's is comparatively more quality and perhaps thus safer (I'm not making a claim, just positing a hypothetical), then it would only be to everyone's benefit if every company didn't have to (often shoddily) reinvent this wheel every time.
- nwah1 8y ago
  Open source tends to work great for re-implementing technology that is already understood. It tends not to work for exploratory research, since that requires risk and ingenuity, not a designed-by-committee approach. R&D of this sort is funded best with a strong profit motive, unless the government is willing to shell out for it.
  - metildaa 8y ago
    I'd disagree, for R&D of novel technology there is a lot to be said for casual contributions. If ML was open source, the state of the industry would almost assuredly be better than the current state of things.
  - Lorkki 8y ago
    I'm not sure how that follows. Most big open-source projects are in practice owned and controlled by a single company/entity, and the processes don't differ much from what you'd see in-house. What you're describing sounds more like how standardisation bodies work than the realities of functioning software projects.
    - nwah1 8y ago
      I guess the corporation, in this case, is acting as a benefactor just as the government would be in other cases. In order to work on pie in the sky ideas, you need to hire brilliant people for long periods of time, with low certainty of success. And this is expensive, and corporations will not generally do this out of the kindness of their hearts... the stars align sometimes where the private incentives and public interests are the same. Xerox PARC, Google X, Bell Labs, and so forth meet this description just as much as DARPA. But the traditional direct profit motive is an important piece of the engine of progress, and relying only on this other incentive structure would cause stagnation.
  - ddoolin 8y ago
    I'm not disagreeing with you at all really (not sure I agree completely, either), which is why I see the need to approach cases like this (self-driving software sharing, not the specific theft of IP case at hand) a bit more specially. I don't have the solution, I just know that lives could potentially be at risk and if the only reason is profit motive, it kinda sucks. I know this happens in other places, too, but it's my opinion that the best safety should be the standard, not a premium. EDIT: Lorkki's comment explains part of my thoughts on it well. Other companies subsidize open source project that exist at the core of their business. Is there a difference here other than scale? If so, what, and how would it change the situation?
  - cortesoft 8y ago
    > since that requires risk and ingenuity That is great for many things, but for something like self-driving tech, it is already being used in cars on the road. This is not just experimental, it already has people's lives on the line. That is a lot of trust in something that is not available to be audited.
  - jeltz 8y ago
    I would not describe many open source projects as designed-by-committee, and while open source might be less suited for exploratory research there have been quite many novel things first implemented in open source projects. Look at the various video codecs or the innovations in compiler technology gcc has contributed to, or the plenty of innovations made in various open source databases.
    - Xorlev 8y ago
      Much of the Apache foundation projects come to mind when thinking about the GP's assertion, though certainly it doesn't hold for all projects: many are fairly novel and exploratory.
      - nwah1 8y ago
        There are a number of them like git and bitcoin which start out with one guy building a novel algorithm and then releasing the source to the world afterwards. The definition of open source might include such a thing, but a project that originates from a lone genius rather than a community is not what is usually meant when people speak of open source.
- lefstathiou 8y ago
  Yes, I wish everything was free too.
- dessant 8y ago
  There needs to be a shift in how proprietary technologies that have universal benefits for our society are viewed. It may be normal for a company to withold information to keep a competitive edge in a nascent industry, but it will also mean that their press releases lauding reduced death rates in their products will be double edged swords, unless they make the ethical decision to share their improvements with other players and reduce death rates across the industry.
  - Quenty 8y ago
    U.S. specific, but this is what the patent system was originally designed to solve, and is a power given to the U.S. government. “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.“
  - hfxtovan 8y ago
    Similar to GPS
  - twblalock 8y ago
    Sharing technology would reduce death rates. But if technology was not shared, competitors would need to reduce death rates even further in order to compete, which might be better for society overall.
    - dessant 8y ago
      They'd also have an easier time further reducing death rates by getting access to tech from competitors sooner, and improve from there.
- tfehring 8y ago
  I completely agree, but it would be hard to incentivize investors to pay for all of the developer time (and, in the case of autonomous vehicles, driver/vehicle time) needed to get the systems up and running without the potential for huge returns to equity. As I see it, there are two ways to avoid the wasteful duplication of effort that we're seeing today: Either a private monopoly pays for it, or the government does. Both options (and the status quo) have their pros and cons, but I'd personally prefer that the government fund it - ideally, borrow to fund R&D now, and then pay off the debt through taxes on autonomous vehicles once they go live. In practice, we're definitely trending toward the first option, one implication of which is that open source is a pipe dream.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  Simple enough to implement. The public owns the roads, the public sets access restrictions for using those roads. Just need a 'no code no road' law.
- DeonPenny 8y ago
  But that isn't what would happen. What would happen is tesla would go out of business because it's no better than it's competitors and because the industry is perfectly competitive no one would have money to reinvest and the tech would never advance.
- basseq 8y ago
  Counterpoint strawman: keeping these systems proprietary might also drive more innovation, as companies "re-inventing the wheel" will come up with different solutions or features that will continue to push the bleeding edge of the industry.
- gnode 8y ago
  The source code of this system may not be all you'd need, or even the most valuable or competitively differentiating element. As I understand it, the system is based on machine learning with a large training dataset gathered from customers (the "fleet learning" technology). From a discussion about determining whether to interpret radar-detected objects as obstacles: "Initially, the vehicle fleet will take no action except to note the position of road signs, bridges and other stationary objects, mapping the world according to radar. The car computer will then silently compare when it would have braked to the driver action and upload that to the Tesla database. If several cars drive safely past a given radar object, whether Autopilot is turned on or off, then that object is added to the geocoded whitelist." https://www.recode.net/2016/9/12/12889358/tesla-autopilot-data-fleet-learning https://www.recode.net/2016/9/12/12889358/tesla-autopilot-da... It may be that much of what makes autopilot effective is just data, rather than intelligent algorithms. Furthermore, giving away such data used to tune the system may create customer privacy concerns.
- asdff 8y ago
  The minute anyone sells a self driving car it will be completely dismantled and quickly reverse engineered by every auto manufacturer, like they already do for every product their competitors put out. The reverse engineering even happens before your product is out. Go to any auto show and you will find employees of other companies taking measurements or scanning paint pigments of concept cars that will never even hit production. You loose your proprietary advantage the minute you sell your first product.
  - HeWhoLurksLate 8y ago
    Aaand? That doesn't make it legal to take internal data about how the car itself was made. Reverse engineering is a complicated process, and one that is costly, and thus makes it risky to do- especially when we're talking ginormous batteries one errant screwdriver away from discharging- and is why it's generally acceptable to reverse a vehicle and not acceptable to take internal documents. For example: knowing that someone machined the 6061 aluminum in the engine is completely different from knowing that it took twelve tries and a five-axis mill to do so, and that the entire chassis takes twelve hours to assemble, twenty people, and fifty-three robots.
gamblor956 8y ago
Tesla is suing former employees for stealing its logistics (warehousing, inventory control, etc.) trade secrets. Tesla has to show that Zoox is using the information the employees allegedly stole. In a nutshell, Tesla would have to show similarities between its logistics processes and Zoox's. (https://www.fenwick.com/FenwickDocuments/Trade_Secrets_Protection.pdf https://www.fenwick.com/FenwickDocuments/Trade_Secrets_Prote... for a good summary) But given the shitshow that is Tesla's logistics , that's extremely unlikely, as Tesla's logistics processes simply aren't valuable IP. Tesla has displayed a chronic inability to manage their own supply chain, especially during the period the employees were at Tesla. If anything, Zoox used the information allegedly taken from Tesla as an example of what not to do logistically, and trade secrets law doesn't let you sue for that. EDIT: To clarify: there are 2 lawsuits in the article. One is against an employee for stealing trade secrets, which doesn't require proof that his new employer is using the secrets. That lawsuit doesn't involve Zoox. The other lawsuit is against Zoox and former Tesla employees for using Tesla's trade secrets. I'm only referring to the one against Zoox. It's pretty clear that the secrets were misappropriated, so the real question is whether those secrets are actually being used.
- sigmar 8y ago
  >If anything, Zoox used the information allegedly taken from Tesla as an example of what not to do logistically, and trade secrets law doesn't let you sue for that. Any other lawyer want to sound off on if this is right? Because it doesn't seem right. If I'm using stolen trade secrets to decide what not to do, I'm still making very good use of that information. Edit: added "other" to first sentence since original commenter is a lawyer
  - Konnstann 8y ago
    It seems very difficult to prove that in a court of law. If you have a "smoking gun" then you probably don't need comparisons, but in the case where you don't have hard evidence proving similarity is much easier.
  - zwkrt 8y ago
    IANAL: I would assume it depends on the situation. If I move from company A to B, and I own a database in both, it is reasonable to expect that mistakes I made at A I won't repeat at B. If A and B were pharmaceuticals and I know A secretly wasted 20b on a compound that B is considering to test, maybe this is a trade secret that I should be careful divulging. My intuition is that there is a line between "taking professional skills with you" and "trade secret".
JeffL 8y ago
Isn't that potentially billions of dollars worth of stolen IP? That's not cool.
duxup 8y ago
It's hard to know what to think of these things with the past strange comments about "saboteurs" and Elon's own strange legal choices related to the SEC. Is this real or more of a sort of blame game strange conspiracy theory thing?
- rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
  Strange legal choices wrt to the SEC? Just wait for the judge decision: the SEC is in a clear overreach here, as all the tweets they cited in their filing are non material. They even misquoted the tweet to say "500K" instead of "about 500K" and anyone can add up the previsouly published numbers to conclude the company should reach a runrate of 500K at the end of the year (Musk tweeted nothing new, it was already disclosed in the quarterly report). You'll see.
  - duxup 8y ago
    It's a strange legal choice when you could just not tweet stuff that any lawyer would tell you not to, first to get in trouble, then to extend it...
    - rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
      Unless it gives Tesla/Musk the opportunity to prove that the SEC is abusive and get a judge to formalize this.
  - Rebelgecko 8y ago
    There's potentially a very large difference between the number of cars made in 2019, and the extrapolated production rate at the end of 2019 (e.g. number of cars made in the last week of December * 52). I could be wrong but I don't think that before the tweet there were any previous filings or announcements saying that Tesla would build 500,000 cars this year.
    - Klathmon 8y ago
      >I could be wrong but I don't think that before the tweet there were any previous filings or announcements saying that Tesla would build 500,000 cars this year. I'm fairly certain that during the Q4 2018 earnings call they talked about expecting to deliver between 350,000 and 500,000 cars in 2019. I'm not a lawyer, I don't know much about public companies or regulations, so I don't know if that counts or not (or if saying "500,000 in 2019" is hugely different than "between 350,000 and 500,000 in 2019"), but it's not like the 500,000 was never said before.
peteradio 8y ago
Better be a legit suit otherwise there goes any legitimate engineering prospects.
mattmg83 8y ago
Reading Bad Blood at the moment and this post immediately made me think of it. Obviously Tesla has already released products that work etc. and I have no clue whether who is in the right here but it's not often we have high profile tech companies suing employees like this.
hiei 8y ago
I would be curious to see what kind of enterprise resource planning software Tesla uses in house. I guess I always just figured they used a setup via Microsoft Dynamics or Oracle.
penny45 8y ago
I have a unpopular opinion here but I actually think Tesla is a tech company and has valuable information worth stealing.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  I agree with you. Tesla is far from perfect, and they make plenty of mistakes, but you can't deny that they basically built a car company from nothing in just a handful of years. And if you take into consideration that they had to spend lots of time to make up for mistakes made along the way (Musk's infamous "we tried to automate too much" statements), that just makes it that much more impressive that they are where they are today. Other commenters here are talking about how their famous difficulty in ramping up production or problems with sourcing parts as if it means there's nothing of value for someone to steal. But I just can't see that being true. I can't see Tesla having absolutely nothing of value in their logistics processes at all. And if there is even one worthwhile thing, something they are doing right that others are hesitant to try, or can't do for other reasons, that's something that is very valuable to Tesla as a company.
- cma 8y ago
  I know software is a different area.. but such valuable secrets they started building cars in an open tent where the whole line could be videoed from the street...
  - erulabs 8y ago
    This is sort of the exact opposite of patent trolls yeah? A patent troll sits on a patent doing next-to-nothing in order to hold on to their "extremely valuable" rights. Tesla on the other-hand is executing on its patents so hard it doesn't even have time to try to protect them. Perhaps their secret is _just doing stuff_, instead of, you know, _not_. If thats the case, with my experience at San Francisco startups, there is a very real chance Zoox hasn't stolen the _valuable_ knowledge :P
    - cma 8y ago
      Trade secrets are different than patents, you can use patents in open air and people can't take them, you have to publish the details to get the patent anyway (in theory). Trade secrets are lost if you exhibit them publicly.
joering2 8y ago
I think this "lawsuit" is an April fools joke, as Tesla openly open source everything they work on: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you
- castratikron 8y ago
  patent != copyright
  - HeWhoLurksLate 8y ago
    To add on that, patents require the disclosure of a method in exchange for a protection of that method. If Tesla applies for a patent, they have "opened the source" by that action. If Tesla then goes and open sources their patents, they've essentially said "we don't need protection anymore, feel free to build this right now instead of in 20 years." Trade secrets, like how they get their material, some specific PLC code, code that isn't specifically disclosed, or change orders for specific mechanisms have de jure copyright and ownership by Tesla. If Tesla decides not to publish, publicize, or even share documents, someone who shouldn't have documents but does, as well as the person who violated the copyright would be in trouble.
elliekelly 8y ago
For anyone curious, TechCrunch posted both complaints on scribd: [1] https://www.scribd.com/document/402668366/Tesla-v-Zoox https://www.scribd.com/document/402668366/Tesla-v-Zoox [2] https://www.scribd.com/document/402668404/Tesla-vs-Guangzhi https://www.scribd.com/document/402668404/Tesla-vs-Guangzhi
shoo 8y ago
i think back to https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon-musk-tried-to-destroy-tesla-whistleblower-martin-tripp https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon... (previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19378658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19378658 ) > Later that day, Tripp heard from the sheriff’s department in Storey County, Nev. Tesla’s security department had passed a tip to police. An anonymous caller had contacted the company to say Tripp was planning a mass shooting at the Gigafactory. it sounds like there's a reasonably high probability that some one high up at Telsa arranged for some bullshit report to be made to police claiming an ex-employee whistleblower was going to go on a shooting spree at the factory. I'd like to see this bullshit report investigated and prosecuted as attempted-murder-(by-cop), this behaviour by any employer to any former employee, let alone a whistleblower, is completely unacceptable. It makes it a bit hard to take other claims made by the same company about other former employees seriously given that in some cases the company is observably acting in a very toxic and fraudulent manner.
- 2cukng498 8y ago
  > prosecuted as attempted-murder-(by-cop), this behaviour by any employer to any former employee, let alone a whistleblower, is completely unacceptable. So the only evidence that we have as to whether this anonymous call did or did not occur is the statements by Tesla alleging that it did, and you choose to believe that it didn't. Why? I can understand holding Telsa to a higher burden of proof, - concluding that we don't have enough evidence - but why jump to claiming it was all made up? Without some evidence indicating it was fabricated, that sounds like a rather slanderous accusation to make.
  - shoo 8y ago
    > did, and you choose to believe that it didn't. Why? maybe the call was indeed real, but the call was from someone in management at Telsa, or someone at arms length that they got to do make the call. i agree this is speculation, if there is evidence that this is the case then whoever was involved stuffed up pretty badly. maybe i'm completely off the mark. as I said, i'd like to see it investigated. Regardless of whether there was actually a call, or who made it, it's difficult to understand what other motivation any party other than Telsa trying to suppress a whistleblower would have to chase after the former employee. again, this is speculation, but i'd bet on it.
vabmit 8y ago
This tactic has been used against companies friends of mine have started. I've only seen it used by large 20+ year old 1970s/1980s publicly traded companies, never someone like Tesla. The way it works is basically that you track where your ex-employees go after they leave. If they go to a competitor/disruptor start-up with out deep pockets, sue that competitor over trade secrets. It's nearly impossible to disprove in court. The competitor start-up exhausts its VC/Angel money on legal fees and goes bankrupt. Potential new customers are wary of using their tech because of the lawsuit. It's a lethal combination that ensures that you don't have to out innovate them. Stealing source code is one thing. I certainly understand suing over that. But, suing over stealing ideas about warehousing from a car company? Really? I don't see any justification for that other than a lack of faith in the ability of your own company to compete and innovate. Full disclosure: I am shorting TSLA stock. I have worked on autonomous vehicles and do not believe Tesla's claims about their technology. I expect Tesla to go bankrupt sometime in the next few years. I'm even more convinced of this now that I see them using company-killer lawsuits against other competing start-ups.
- HeWhoLurksLate 8y ago
  If you are a relatively new company, getting on stable ground, would you appreciate it if someone stole your IP and then proceeded to copy you, and get a huge boost past the part that nearly bankrupted you and left you homeless? That's not very fair to me, either. Full disclosure: I do agree that there is such a thing as going overboard, but when your top engineers get recruited to a new company doing the same exact thing and take their laptop with them, that's a bit much. Especially when they load up all their drives with documentation before they leave.
- Fricken 8y ago
  Tesla has done this previously a meritless trade secrets theft case against Henry Fisker after he left the company, and later against Aurora innovation, a company cofounded by Sterling Anderson, a former director of Autopilot.
- xedeon 8y ago
  > I am shorting TSLA stock Then you are financially motivated to spew lies. Short sellers are probably the scummiest people on the planet, that will do anything to make a quick buck. Take this for example: http://www.cc.com/video-clips/rfag2r/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-exclusive---jim-cramer-extended-interview-pt--2 http://www.cc.com/video-clips/rfag2r/the-daily-show-with-jon... > I expect Tesla to go bankrupt sometime in the next few years. Short sellers have been saying that since 2008 because it serves their interest. Yet, here we are a full decade later.
zaroth 8y ago
I get that it’s fun to beat up on Tesla. We love nothing more than the little guy winning and the winning guy brought low. Tis the great cycle of life. However, Tesla is the largest battery manufacturer in the world, and manufactures their batteries at significantly lower cost, higher performance, tighter tolerances, and with greater automation than anyone else in the world. It’s underestimating the difficulty of the problem by far to point to specific (relatively minor, if not insignificant) failures of Tesla and generalize that their logistics IP isn’t worth stealing or couldn’t possibly be beneficial to a competitor. The gross margins that Tesla has achieved on the Model 3 I believe speaks for itself as the worlds best at that price point, and that does not come without a well run supply chain. There is no question that Tesla runs hot. I’d like to see anyone else try and come close to what they’ve shipped without a fair share of fuckups along the way.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  > I get that it’s fun to beat up on Tesla. There are many reasons to legitimately shit on Tesla including their worker treatment, statements made by their CEO etc.
  - zaroth 8y ago
    The point isn’t that you can prove Tesla isn’t perfect. That goes without saying. The assertion was they are so far from perfect that in fact their IP isn’t even defensible in a court of law. So please don’t reply with more quips about how Tesla isn’t perfect. Why does their CEO mouthing off on Twitter, or attacking disgruntled employees, or dubious onsite health care, or pie-in-the-sky volume estimates, or market manipulation, or literal dumpster fires on their property, mean that their IP is so much shit it can be stolen without consequence? Throughout, despite, or perhaps even in part due to all of the above, they have still achieved great things and changed an industry. They are still the biggest battery manufacturer in the world. They still make a handful of really fucking awesome electric cars, which you can order in a few minutes on your phone and have delivered to your house. And their margins on those cars are the industry best. Those points seem to support the notion that they must have some valuable logistical IP and trade secrets backing that up.
mikekchar 8y ago
I've often joked that the companies I work for should give their source code to their competitors. By the time the competitors figure it out, our company will be so far ahead :-) It is interesting to speculate on the value of source code, though. For Tesla autopilot I'm more than willing to accept that there is some "secret sauce" of trade secrets in there that would help out a competitor, but usually I find that source code contains the most mundane stuff. Most professionals could write it nearly as fast as they could learn to work with the legacy systems if they knew what they were building. Instead it's the requirements that are gold. You figure out exactly what needs to be built in a great amount of detail, then you are at least as well off as having it big ball of messy logic. Take note those that want to "steal" a competitor's project: just buy a copy of the executable and start figuring out exactly what it does ;-) BTW, as a (on topic) side note, I once had an ex-colleague tell me that they copied all of the source code for every company they ever worked for -- just so they could look stuff up. It is not completely implausible that an ex-employee would copy the code to help their own performance without any involvement of their new employer.
winningcontinue 8y ago
There's an emerging trend with tech companies to sue former individual employees for theft. It's a departure from the usual practice of suing other companies who acquire the employee and work on a competing product. The idea in silicon valley is to intimidate not the person being sued, but all future employees within your own company who might be thinking of doing the same thing. It entirely changes the calculus of moving on to another firm when you know you'd be dealing with litigation for years afterwords. It's a shame because Silicon Valley was built on former employees leaving their companies and starting their own firms to innovate.
kirillzubovsky 8y ago
Is there any enterprise software that looks for this behavior inside corp systems and alerts the admins/management? If someone just goes ahead and downloads 300k files, that must not be a very normal way of operations, regardless of your role. Even if there are jobs where one would need to download so many files, the systems could be alerted with appropriate flags. What do the big Cos use for this?
xedeon 8y ago
The amount of vitriol against Tesla here is insane. Just the fact that incumbent car manufacturers are now seriously considering electric cars after decades of ignorance because of Tesla is a great win for humanity. Virtually all tech companies have missteps and Tesla is no exception. Let's look at the big picture here in what Tesla is trying to do. We had Solar panels installed with a Tesla powerwall and did home efficiency improvements and are now pretty much self sufficient (includes charging our vehicles). Think about that for a second. Meanwhile. We have Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon and even Apple just cater to our desires for consumerism and endless distraction with some of them even trampling user privacy. But hey, let's all trash everything about Tesla because it's the hip thing to do right?

274 points by Element_ 8y ago

Interesting. I thought Baidu and Alibaba are supposed to be leading AI companies. If so, why would XiaoPeng not partner with them?

ddoolin 8y ago

This might be unpopular here, but I kind of wish this and other similar systems were more open source, or even just shared between companies. If companies are going to be putting a system out there on the streets anyway, and Tesla's is comparatively more quality and perhaps thus safer (I'm not making a claim, just positing a hypothetical), then it would only be to everyone's benefit if every company didn't have to (often shoddily) reinvent this wheel every time.

nwah1 8y ago
Open source tends to work great for re-implementing technology that is already understood. It tends not to work for exploratory research, since that requires risk and ingenuity, not a designed-by-committee approach. R&D of this sort is funded best with a strong profit motive, unless the government is willing to shell out for it.
- metildaa 8y ago
  I'd disagree, for R&D of novel technology there is a lot to be said for casual contributions. If ML was open source, the state of the industry would almost assuredly be better than the current state of things.
- Lorkki 8y ago
  I'm not sure how that follows. Most big open-source projects are in practice owned and controlled by a single company/entity, and the processes don't differ much from what you'd see in-house. What you're describing sounds more like how standardisation bodies work than the realities of functioning software projects.
  - nwah1 8y ago
    I guess the corporation, in this case, is acting as a benefactor just as the government would be in other cases. In order to work on pie in the sky ideas, you need to hire brilliant people for long periods of time, with low certainty of success. And this is expensive, and corporations will not generally do this out of the kindness of their hearts... the stars align sometimes where the private incentives and public interests are the same. Xerox PARC, Google X, Bell Labs, and so forth meet this description just as much as DARPA. But the traditional direct profit motive is an important piece of the engine of progress, and relying only on this other incentive structure would cause stagnation.
- ddoolin 8y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with you at all really (not sure I agree completely, either), which is why I see the need to approach cases like this (self-driving software sharing, not the specific theft of IP case at hand) a bit more specially. I don't have the solution, I just know that lives could potentially be at risk and if the only reason is profit motive, it kinda sucks. I know this happens in other places, too, but it's my opinion that the best safety should be the standard, not a premium. EDIT: Lorkki's comment explains part of my thoughts on it well. Other companies subsidize open source project that exist at the core of their business. Is there a difference here other than scale? If so, what, and how would it change the situation?
- cortesoft 8y ago
  > since that requires risk and ingenuity That is great for many things, but for something like self-driving tech, it is already being used in cars on the road. This is not just experimental, it already has people's lives on the line. That is a lot of trust in something that is not available to be audited.
- jeltz 8y ago
  I would not describe many open source projects as designed-by-committee, and while open source might be less suited for exploratory research there have been quite many novel things first implemented in open source projects. Look at the various video codecs or the innovations in compiler technology gcc has contributed to, or the plenty of innovations made in various open source databases.
  - Xorlev 8y ago
    Much of the Apache foundation projects come to mind when thinking about the GP's assertion, though certainly it doesn't hold for all projects: many are fairly novel and exploratory.
    - nwah1 8y ago
      There are a number of them like git and bitcoin which start out with one guy building a novel algorithm and then releasing the source to the world afterwards. The definition of open source might include such a thing, but a project that originates from a lone genius rather than a community is not what is usually meant when people speak of open source.
lefstathiou 8y ago
Yes, I wish everything was free too.
dessant 8y ago
There needs to be a shift in how proprietary technologies that have universal benefits for our society are viewed. It may be normal for a company to withold information to keep a competitive edge in a nascent industry, but it will also mean that their press releases lauding reduced death rates in their products will be double edged swords, unless they make the ethical decision to share their improvements with other players and reduce death rates across the industry.
- Quenty 8y ago
  U.S. specific, but this is what the patent system was originally designed to solve, and is a power given to the U.S. government. “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.“
- hfxtovan 8y ago
  Similar to GPS
- twblalock 8y ago
  Sharing technology would reduce death rates. But if technology was not shared, competitors would need to reduce death rates even further in order to compete, which might be better for society overall.
  - dessant 8y ago
    They'd also have an easier time further reducing death rates by getting access to tech from competitors sooner, and improve from there.
tfehring 8y ago
I completely agree, but it would be hard to incentivize investors to pay for all of the developer time (and, in the case of autonomous vehicles, driver/vehicle time) needed to get the systems up and running without the potential for huge returns to equity. As I see it, there are two ways to avoid the wasteful duplication of effort that we're seeing today: Either a private monopoly pays for it, or the government does. Both options (and the status quo) have their pros and cons, but I'd personally prefer that the government fund it - ideally, borrow to fund R&D now, and then pay off the debt through taxes on autonomous vehicles once they go live. In practice, we're definitely trending toward the first option, one implication of which is that open source is a pipe dream.
linuxftw 8y ago
Simple enough to implement. The public owns the roads, the public sets access restrictions for using those roads. Just need a 'no code no road' law.
DeonPenny 8y ago
But that isn't what would happen. What would happen is tesla would go out of business because it's no better than it's competitors and because the industry is perfectly competitive no one would have money to reinvest and the tech would never advance.
basseq 8y ago
Counterpoint strawman: keeping these systems proprietary might also drive more innovation, as companies "re-inventing the wheel" will come up with different solutions or features that will continue to push the bleeding edge of the industry.
gnode 8y ago
The source code of this system may not be all you'd need, or even the most valuable or competitively differentiating element. As I understand it, the system is based on machine learning with a large training dataset gathered from customers (the "fleet learning" technology). From a discussion about determining whether to interpret radar-detected objects as obstacles: "Initially, the vehicle fleet will take no action except to note the position of road signs, bridges and other stationary objects, mapping the world according to radar. The car computer will then silently compare when it would have braked to the driver action and upload that to the Tesla database. If several cars drive safely past a given radar object, whether Autopilot is turned on or off, then that object is added to the geocoded whitelist." https://www.recode.net/2016/9/12/12889358/tesla-autopilot-data-fleet-learning https://www.recode.net/2016/9/12/12889358/tesla-autopilot-da... It may be that much of what makes autopilot effective is just data, rather than intelligent algorithms. Furthermore, giving away such data used to tune the system may create customer privacy concerns.
asdff 8y ago
The minute anyone sells a self driving car it will be completely dismantled and quickly reverse engineered by every auto manufacturer, like they already do for every product their competitors put out. The reverse engineering even happens before your product is out. Go to any auto show and you will find employees of other companies taking measurements or scanning paint pigments of concept cars that will never even hit production. You loose your proprietary advantage the minute you sell your first product.
- HeWhoLurksLate 8y ago
  Aaand? That doesn't make it legal to take internal data about how the car itself was made. Reverse engineering is a complicated process, and one that is costly, and thus makes it risky to do- especially when we're talking ginormous batteries one errant screwdriver away from discharging- and is why it's generally acceptable to reverse a vehicle and not acceptable to take internal documents. For example: knowing that someone machined the 6061 aluminum in the engine is completely different from knowing that it took twelve tries and a five-axis mill to do so, and that the entire chassis takes twelve hours to assemble, twenty people, and fifty-three robots.

gamblor956 8y ago

Tesla is suing former employees for stealing its logistics (warehousing, inventory control, etc.) trade secrets. Tesla has to show that Zoox is using the information the employees allegedly stole. In a nutshell, Tesla would have to show similarities between its logistics processes and Zoox's. (https://www.fenwick.com/FenwickDocuments/Trade_Secrets_Protection.pdf https://www.fenwick.com/FenwickDocuments/Trade_Secrets_Prote... for a good summary) But given the shitshow that is Tesla's logistics , that's extremely unlikely, as Tesla's logistics processes simply aren't valuable IP. Tesla has displayed a chronic inability to manage their own supply chain, especially during the period the employees were at Tesla. If anything, Zoox used the information allegedly taken from Tesla as an example of what not to do logistically, and trade secrets law doesn't let you sue for that. EDIT: To clarify: there are 2 lawsuits in the article. One is against an employee for stealing trade secrets, which doesn't require proof that his new employer is using the secrets. That lawsuit doesn't involve Zoox. The other lawsuit is against Zoox and former Tesla employees for using Tesla's trade secrets. I'm only referring to the one against Zoox. It's pretty clear that the secrets were misappropriated, so the real question is whether those secrets are actually being used.

sigmar 8y ago
>If anything, Zoox used the information allegedly taken from Tesla as an example of what not to do logistically, and trade secrets law doesn't let you sue for that. Any other lawyer want to sound off on if this is right? Because it doesn't seem right. If I'm using stolen trade secrets to decide what not to do, I'm still making very good use of that information. Edit: added "other" to first sentence since original commenter is a lawyer
- Konnstann 8y ago
  It seems very difficult to prove that in a court of law. If you have a "smoking gun" then you probably don't need comparisons, but in the case where you don't have hard evidence proving similarity is much easier.
- zwkrt 8y ago
  IANAL: I would assume it depends on the situation. If I move from company A to B, and I own a database in both, it is reasonable to expect that mistakes I made at A I won't repeat at B. If A and B were pharmaceuticals and I know A secretly wasted 20b on a compound that B is considering to test, maybe this is a trade secret that I should be careful divulging. My intuition is that there is a line between "taking professional skills with you" and "trade secret".

JeffL 8y ago

Isn't that potentially billions of dollars worth of stolen IP? That's not cool.

duxup 8y ago

It's hard to know what to think of these things with the past strange comments about "saboteurs" and Elon's own strange legal choices related to the SEC. Is this real or more of a sort of blame game strange conspiracy theory thing?

rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
Strange legal choices wrt to the SEC? Just wait for the judge decision: the SEC is in a clear overreach here, as all the tweets they cited in their filing are non material. They even misquoted the tweet to say "500K" instead of "about 500K" and anyone can add up the previsouly published numbers to conclude the company should reach a runrate of 500K at the end of the year (Musk tweeted nothing new, it was already disclosed in the quarterly report). You'll see.
- duxup 8y ago
  It's a strange legal choice when you could just not tweet stuff that any lawyer would tell you not to, first to get in trouble, then to extend it...
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
    Unless it gives Tesla/Musk the opportunity to prove that the SEC is abusive and get a judge to formalize this.
- Rebelgecko 8y ago
  There's potentially a very large difference between the number of cars made in 2019, and the extrapolated production rate at the end of 2019 (e.g. number of cars made in the last week of December * 52). I could be wrong but I don't think that before the tweet there were any previous filings or announcements saying that Tesla would build 500,000 cars this year.
  - Klathmon 8y ago
    >I could be wrong but I don't think that before the tweet there were any previous filings or announcements saying that Tesla would build 500,000 cars this year. I'm fairly certain that during the Q4 2018 earnings call they talked about expecting to deliver between 350,000 and 500,000 cars in 2019. I'm not a lawyer, I don't know much about public companies or regulations, so I don't know if that counts or not (or if saying "500,000 in 2019" is hugely different than "between 350,000 and 500,000 in 2019"), but it's not like the 500,000 was never said before.

peteradio 8y ago

Better be a legit suit otherwise there goes any legitimate engineering prospects.

mattmg83 8y ago

Reading Bad Blood at the moment and this post immediately made me think of it. Obviously Tesla has already released products that work etc. and I have no clue whether who is in the right here but it's not often we have high profile tech companies suing employees like this.

hiei 8y ago

I would be curious to see what kind of enterprise resource planning software Tesla uses in house. I guess I always just figured they used a setup via Microsoft Dynamics or Oracle.

penny45 8y ago

I have a unpopular opinion here but I actually think Tesla is a tech company and has valuable information worth stealing.

Klathmon 8y ago
I agree with you. Tesla is far from perfect, and they make plenty of mistakes, but you can't deny that they basically built a car company from nothing in just a handful of years. And if you take into consideration that they had to spend lots of time to make up for mistakes made along the way (Musk's infamous "we tried to automate too much" statements), that just makes it that much more impressive that they are where they are today. Other commenters here are talking about how their famous difficulty in ramping up production or problems with sourcing parts as if it means there's nothing of value for someone to steal. But I just can't see that being true. I can't see Tesla having absolutely nothing of value in their logistics processes at all. And if there is even one worthwhile thing, something they are doing right that others are hesitant to try, or can't do for other reasons, that's something that is very valuable to Tesla as a company.
cma 8y ago
I know software is a different area.. but such valuable secrets they started building cars in an open tent where the whole line could be videoed from the street...
- erulabs 8y ago
  This is sort of the exact opposite of patent trolls yeah? A patent troll sits on a patent doing next-to-nothing in order to hold on to their "extremely valuable" rights. Tesla on the other-hand is executing on its patents so hard it doesn't even have time to try to protect them. Perhaps their secret is _just doing stuff_, instead of, you know, _not_. If thats the case, with my experience at San Francisco startups, there is a very real chance Zoox hasn't stolen the _valuable_ knowledge :P
  - cma 8y ago
    Trade secrets are different than patents, you can use patents in open air and people can't take them, you have to publish the details to get the patent anyway (in theory). Trade secrets are lost if you exhibit them publicly.

joering2 8y ago

I think this "lawsuit" is an April fools joke, as Tesla openly open source everything they work on: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

castratikron 8y ago
patent != copyright
- HeWhoLurksLate 8y ago
  To add on that, patents require the disclosure of a method in exchange for a protection of that method. If Tesla applies for a patent, they have "opened the source" by that action. If Tesla then goes and open sources their patents, they've essentially said "we don't need protection anymore, feel free to build this right now instead of in 20 years." Trade secrets, like how they get their material, some specific PLC code, code that isn't specifically disclosed, or change orders for specific mechanisms have de jure copyright and ownership by Tesla. If Tesla decides not to publish, publicize, or even share documents, someone who shouldn't have documents but does, as well as the person who violated the copyright would be in trouble.

elliekelly 8y ago

For anyone curious, TechCrunch posted both complaints on scribd: [1] https://www.scribd.com/document/402668366/Tesla-v-Zoox https://www.scribd.com/document/402668366/Tesla-v-Zoox [2] https://www.scribd.com/document/402668404/Tesla-vs-Guangzhi https://www.scribd.com/document/402668404/Tesla-vs-Guangzhi

shoo 8y ago

i think back to https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon-musk-tried-to-destroy-tesla-whistleblower-martin-tripp https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon... (previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19378658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19378658 ) > Later that day, Tripp heard from the sheriff’s department in Storey County, Nev. Tesla’s security department had passed a tip to police. An anonymous caller had contacted the company to say Tripp was planning a mass shooting at the Gigafactory. it sounds like there's a reasonably high probability that some one high up at Telsa arranged for some bullshit report to be made to police claiming an ex-employee whistleblower was going to go on a shooting spree at the factory. I'd like to see this bullshit report investigated and prosecuted as attempted-murder-(by-cop), this behaviour by any employer to any former employee, let alone a whistleblower, is completely unacceptable. It makes it a bit hard to take other claims made by the same company about other former employees seriously given that in some cases the company is observably acting in a very toxic and fraudulent manner.

2cukng498 8y ago
> prosecuted as attempted-murder-(by-cop), this behaviour by any employer to any former employee, let alone a whistleblower, is completely unacceptable. So the only evidence that we have as to whether this anonymous call did or did not occur is the statements by Tesla alleging that it did, and you choose to believe that it didn't. Why? I can understand holding Telsa to a higher burden of proof, - concluding that we don't have enough evidence - but why jump to claiming it was all made up? Without some evidence indicating it was fabricated, that sounds like a rather slanderous accusation to make.
- shoo 8y ago
  > did, and you choose to believe that it didn't. Why? maybe the call was indeed real, but the call was from someone in management at Telsa, or someone at arms length that they got to do make the call. i agree this is speculation, if there is evidence that this is the case then whoever was involved stuffed up pretty badly. maybe i'm completely off the mark. as I said, i'd like to see it investigated. Regardless of whether there was actually a call, or who made it, it's difficult to understand what other motivation any party other than Telsa trying to suppress a whistleblower would have to chase after the former employee. again, this is speculation, but i'd bet on it.

vabmit 8y ago

This tactic has been used against companies friends of mine have started. I've only seen it used by large 20+ year old 1970s/1980s publicly traded companies, never someone like Tesla. The way it works is basically that you track where your ex-employees go after they leave. If they go to a competitor/disruptor start-up with out deep pockets, sue that competitor over trade secrets. It's nearly impossible to disprove in court. The competitor start-up exhausts its VC/Angel money on legal fees and goes bankrupt. Potential new customers are wary of using their tech because of the lawsuit. It's a lethal combination that ensures that you don't have to out innovate them. Stealing source code is one thing. I certainly understand suing over that. But, suing over stealing ideas about warehousing from a car company? Really? I don't see any justification for that other than a lack of faith in the ability of your own company to compete and innovate. Full disclosure: I am shorting TSLA stock. I have worked on autonomous vehicles and do not believe Tesla's claims about their technology. I expect Tesla to go bankrupt sometime in the next few years. I'm even more convinced of this now that I see them using company-killer lawsuits against other competing start-ups.

HeWhoLurksLate 8y ago
If you are a relatively new company, getting on stable ground, would you appreciate it if someone stole your IP and then proceeded to copy you, and get a huge boost past the part that nearly bankrupted you and left you homeless? That's not very fair to me, either. Full disclosure: I do agree that there is such a thing as going overboard, but when your top engineers get recruited to a new company doing the same exact thing and take their laptop with them, that's a bit much. Especially when they load up all their drives with documentation before they leave.
Fricken 8y ago
Tesla has done this previously a meritless trade secrets theft case against Henry Fisker after he left the company, and later against Aurora innovation, a company cofounded by Sterling Anderson, a former director of Autopilot.
xedeon 8y ago
> I am shorting TSLA stock Then you are financially motivated to spew lies. Short sellers are probably the scummiest people on the planet, that will do anything to make a quick buck. Take this for example: http://www.cc.com/video-clips/rfag2r/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-exclusive---jim-cramer-extended-interview-pt--2 http://www.cc.com/video-clips/rfag2r/the-daily-show-with-jon... > I expect Tesla to go bankrupt sometime in the next few years. Short sellers have been saying that since 2008 because it serves their interest. Yet, here we are a full decade later.

zaroth 8y ago

I get that it’s fun to beat up on Tesla. We love nothing more than the little guy winning and the winning guy brought low. Tis the great cycle of life. However, Tesla is the largest battery manufacturer in the world, and manufactures their batteries at significantly lower cost, higher performance, tighter tolerances, and with greater automation than anyone else in the world. It’s underestimating the difficulty of the problem by far to point to specific (relatively minor, if not insignificant) failures of Tesla and generalize that their logistics IP isn’t worth stealing or couldn’t possibly be beneficial to a competitor. The gross margins that Tesla has achieved on the Model 3 I believe speaks for itself as the worlds best at that price point, and that does not come without a well run supply chain. There is no question that Tesla runs hot. I’d like to see anyone else try and come close to what they’ve shipped without a fair share of fuckups along the way.

AsyncAwait 8y ago
> I get that it’s fun to beat up on Tesla. There are many reasons to legitimately shit on Tesla including their worker treatment, statements made by their CEO etc.
- zaroth 8y ago
  The point isn’t that you can prove Tesla isn’t perfect. That goes without saying. The assertion was they are so far from perfect that in fact their IP isn’t even defensible in a court of law. So please don’t reply with more quips about how Tesla isn’t perfect. Why does their CEO mouthing off on Twitter, or attacking disgruntled employees, or dubious onsite health care, or pie-in-the-sky volume estimates, or market manipulation, or literal dumpster fires on their property, mean that their IP is so much shit it can be stolen without consequence? Throughout, despite, or perhaps even in part due to all of the above, they have still achieved great things and changed an industry. They are still the biggest battery manufacturer in the world. They still make a handful of really fucking awesome electric cars, which you can order in a few minutes on your phone and have delivered to your house. And their margins on those cars are the industry best. Those points seem to support the notion that they must have some valuable logistical IP and trade secrets backing that up.

mikekchar 8y ago

I've often joked that the companies I work for should give their source code to their competitors. By the time the competitors figure it out, our company will be so far ahead :-) It is interesting to speculate on the value of source code, though. For Tesla autopilot I'm more than willing to accept that there is some "secret sauce" of trade secrets in there that would help out a competitor, but usually I find that source code contains the most mundane stuff. Most professionals could write it nearly as fast as they could learn to work with the legacy systems if they knew what they were building. Instead it's the requirements that are gold. You figure out exactly what needs to be built in a great amount of detail, then you are at least as well off as having it big ball of messy logic. Take note those that want to "steal" a competitor's project: just buy a copy of the executable and start figuring out exactly what it does ;-) BTW, as a (on topic) side note, I once had an ex-colleague tell me that they copied all of the source code for every company they ever worked for -- just so they could look stuff up. It is not completely implausible that an ex-employee would copy the code to help their own performance without any involvement of their new employer.

winningcontinue 8y ago

There's an emerging trend with tech companies to sue former individual employees for theft. It's a departure from the usual practice of suing other companies who acquire the employee and work on a competing product. The idea in silicon valley is to intimidate not the person being sued, but all future employees within your own company who might be thinking of doing the same thing. It entirely changes the calculus of moving on to another firm when you know you'd be dealing with litigation for years afterwords. It's a shame because Silicon Valley was built on former employees leaving their companies and starting their own firms to innovate.

kirillzubovsky 8y ago

Is there any enterprise software that looks for this behavior inside corp systems and alerts the admins/management? If someone just goes ahead and downloads 300k files, that must not be a very normal way of operations, regardless of your role. Even if there are jobs where one would need to download so many files, the systems could be alerted with appropriate flags. What do the big Cos use for this?

xedeon 8y ago

The amount of vitriol against Tesla here is insane. Just the fact that incumbent car manufacturers are now seriously considering electric cars after decades of ignorance because of Tesla is a great win for humanity. Virtually all tech companies have missteps and Tesla is no exception. Let's look at the big picture here in what Tesla is trying to do. We had Solar panels installed with a Tesla powerwall and did home efficiency improvements and are now pretty much self sufficient (includes charging our vehicles). Think about that for a second. Meanwhile. We have Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon and even Apple just cater to our desires for consumerism and endless distraction with some of them even trampling user privacy. But hey, let's all trash everything about Tesla because it's the hip thing to do right?