It feels perverse that when Uber's stolen technology killed a pedestrian, nobody was held liable and in fact no charges were pressed and no civil lawsuits were filed. But the person who stole that technology was indicted and is getting financially destroyed.
That covers the civil side of things, but GPs point about criminal charges still applies. Yeah, they might have signed an NDA but I don't think those can restrict what can be uncovered during discovery (but I could be wrong -- IANAL).
Sure, but I'm sure some prosecutor took a look at it and decided it wasn't worthwhile. People get killed in accidents all the time, and frequently nobody gets charged with anything. A person being killed in a car accident while jaywalking at night because the driver wasn't paying attention particularly well is a story as old as cars, and usually doesn't result in jail time. Turns out, people are legally allowed to drive while being really shitty drivers, and you mostly can't prosecute people criminally just for being bad at driving. If anyone was going to face criminal charges it would be the driver, and I suppose the relevant prosecutor didn't like the odds.
"some prosecutor took a look at it and decided it wasn't worthwhile"
Probably a prosecutor that works for some local government that could be also be liable for letting Uber operate that car in their jurisdiction. I imagine that discussion happened.
"The state and city of Tempe were hit with a lawsuit Monday over their alleged negligence in the fatal crash between a self-driving Uber and a pedestrian a year ago."
> Turns out, people are legally allowed to drive while being really shitty drivers
The UK actually has a law against this, see "Causing Death by Careless or Inconsiderate Driving (Section 2B of the Road Traffic Act 1988, amended by the Road Safety Act 2006, s. 20)" here: http://www.brake.org.uk/news/15-facts-a-resources/facts/497-...
It means you can be prosecuted for causing a death in a moment of inattention. It's a bad law from both sides: As you can see from the link above it doesn't satisfy the charity (who want stronger penalties), while at the same time being a catch-all law which could catch anyone out who drives, even if they are generally very cautious drivers.
By the way I should add there was already a separate law for causing death by dangerous driving.
One more reason why we need self-driving cars I suppose.
It’s illegal to run people over by accident in the US too (if it was feasibly avoidable). The parent’s point was that prosecutors usually exercise their discretion not to charge them.
Absolutely. However humans are simply not built to be incredibly careful for minutes on end, day after day. One hopes self-driving cars will never let their guard down.
Prosecutors, even high profile/positioned ones, have a finite amount of resources. At the end of the day it might be romantic to go after a megacorp but a prosecutor's job is to persue justice against criminals, you might get a few high profile executive types and justice for one family (if you're the type to consider beyond the defendant) but with those same resources and time you could probably lock up at least twenty violent, in the real way, deadbeats. I'm not saying that's the way it should be, but I think it's worth acknowledging because it's why the problem is hard to solve. Everyone wants to see big fish getting hard time, but reality looks more like Harvey Dent's speech to Commissioner Gordon and that's for the good prosecutors.
But moreover, it's totally unreasonable that anyone would have gone to jail as a result of this, except again, maybe the driver. The driver was literally being paid to monitor the vehicle. How is an argument that high profile executive types were engaging in criminal negligence going to fly, when the bar for legal driving is already that 1 person is in the car nominally paying attention?
Because the driver was given an impossible task in order to save money for the company. They were required to both fill in information on a tablet and monitor the car. It's not even clear that monitoring a semi-self driving car is even possible. Constant vigilance for the 2% of edge cases where it might crash is harder than just driving. Uber had previously used two people to do this task but had switched to one person.
Executives must be prosecuted when their money saving results in deaths or else there is no incentive for them not to make this trade off.
Not taking sides here but want to point out one thing:
When I took the Uber self driving cab in Pittsburgh (randomly called on my Uber), there were two people in the car.
One person was a driver, and the other person was in the passenger seat with a laptop. They were both very polite. The person with the laptop was very focused and watched the sensors take in information.
The driver -- at least in my case -- was very cautious and almost never let the car do anything by itself. He was almost driving it the whole time.
This is right after Uber brought over the team from Carnegie Mellon (so 2015 ish?).
Yeah, but out of all the self-driving test miles Uber is doing, how many are in the self-driving cabs vs non-public road testing?
I would expect them to be very careful with a passenger in the car scrutinizing but much less so in a test car. If a high enough percentage of the millions of miles these companies are doing are tests without passengers, there could be a lot of road miles happening with a single overburdened driver that the public isn't seeing much of.
There are a bunch of incentives for them to get this right. Moreover there might be a reasonable argument that they are having a net positive impact even if their car was slightly less safe than most drivers - they are going to save people probably single digit % points of their life staring at a road.
If you think their car isn't safe; don't buy one and don't be driven in one. It isn't reasonable to say they can't have the occasional accident though.
>nobody was held liable and in fact no charges were pressed and no civil lawsuits were filed
As noted below Uber settled (that typically means their insurer settled) so there is no need for a civil lawsuit. That is efficiency of the system and how the system is supposed to work. In other words you only bring a suit against the insured if the insurer wrongfully denies your claim, here the insurer paid up, so there is no need for a civil suit by the estate of the deceased against Uber.
The criminal side of things is interesting...but for sake of argument lets say you were in an accident, further assume it was your fault, resulting in a fatality. Typically, unless there was a separate crime (e.g. DUI, drag racing, etc...) there will be no criminal charge, just a civil traffic ticket for the accident (in many jurisdictions there will be a specific charge/penalties for an accident resulting in a fatality, but that will still be a traffic ticket, meaning non-criminal).
I am curious if the "driver" received a traffic ticket for the accident, my guess is he did, I can't imagine the responding officer(s) not issuing a traffic ticket for an accident much less one resulting in a fatality. Interestingly these traffic tickets for accidents with fatalities do usually carry a potential penalties that include suspension of the drivers license, so I do think the law will need to catch up with reality in that regard because suspending the driver's DL doesn't seem to punish the right party in the case of a self-driving car, so perhaps these states that allow self-driving cars need to think about adopting traffic laws specific to self-driving cars and figure out who those tickets should go to and the proper punishment (obviously you can't suspend the DL of a self-driving car or a car company).
| obviously you can't suspend the DL of a self-driving car or a car company
Why not? They have to have some kind of license to operate, right? Even if it's not labelled "driver's license". If their vehicles are going around running people over, revoke whatever license it is that they have until they get it fixed.
>so perhaps these states that allow self-driving cars need to think about adopting traffic laws specific to self-driving cars and figure out who those tickets should go to and the proper punishment
> obviously you can't suspend the DL of a self-driving car or a car company
Why not? This (suspending permission to operate on public roads) seems like a perfectly reasonable response to a self-driving car company being negligent.
As I replied to the first comment asking the same thing, the sentence preceding the statement you quoted explains what needs to be done:
>so perhaps these states that allow self-driving cars need to think about adopting traffic laws specific to self-driving cars and figure out who those tickets should go to and the proper punishment
Police can't just make up traffic violations that don't currently exist and Courts can't begin dishing out punishments that don't exist for violations that don't exist.
Vehicles are certified as safe to operate on public roads by the (federal) government; that certification can be revoked by regulators. Many states have specific laws licensing self-driving cars to operate; the regulators in those states can also revoke permission. There's no need to invent violations.
I think the deceased and their family would disagree.
Sure there are existing regulations, but the idea is that as this new technology evolves and is being tested in the field we will find failures and create new regulations to govern.
Consider when the horseless carriage began replacing horse and buggy, traffic laws evolved over time as we realized we needed lanes, traffic signals, speed limits, etc...
Those laws continue to evolve to this day (ex.: red light cameras, ride-for-hire, etc...), to suggest new laws are not required for driver less vehicles and the current laws are sufficient, especially where we have driver-less vehicle death, suggests a serious disconnect with how law works.
They never actually used the stolen tech, right? It wasn't good enough. They hit the pedestrian solely on their own tech, which (clearly, in hindsight) wasn't good enough either.
It wasn't disclosed on whether stolen IP was used - Uber had (still have?) to cooperate with Waymo, inspecting their hardware and software stack.
The pedestrian ultimately got hit because a lot of fallback systems failed: They disabled the software's ability to emergency-break (1), they disabled the cars' systems to emergency break, and the operator of the vehicle was distracted, not reacting in time.
(1) This was actually done due to false-positives, i.e. the car slamming on the breaks in non-emergency cases. (I find that's a relevant point, because without that detail it just sounds more ludicrous than it already is).
The IP wasn't the problem in the accident, rather the implementation. Simplified, the software was tuned in favor of ignoring obstacles as false positives. By the time the system acknowledged the immediate danger it was too late. No tech, no matter how good the IP, could stand up to being tweaked like this.
And the emergency breaking relied on the human operator but the system was not designed to warn the operator.
Levandowski just filed for bankruptcy saying he has less than $100M in assets .
Does anyone know if he will only pay a percentage or is only delaying this by kicking the can down the road to another court ?
I would be highly surprised if his employer (Uber) shouldered any of the this
1) He did not own 100% of that company. 2) There were 4 cofounders and 90 employees.
3) He got paid mostly in Uber shares that vested over time and he left before they vested.
Very difficult to answer this with specificity, but in general there are a number of factors that influence the amount of cash you ultimately net from a sale, including:
- Cap table: what % is owed to other founders, investors, employees, etc?
- The total acquisition price may include substantial legal and other fees that will lower the actual amount received by the owners or shareholders.
- How much of the acquisition is financed through cash vs. equity? Equity may vest over a certain time period, and be subject to certain requirements (your sustained performance, ability to clear legal scrutiny, etc.).
- Taxes.
Taking all of this (and probably more) into consideration, it doesn't seem unreasonable for a founder to ultimately net <10% of the total sale price. Again, this is all wild speculation in this particular case.
His company existed for a seven months in 2016 before being bought by Uber. It isn't clear (to me) if there were third party investors or what the cap table was, broadly. Purportedly 90 employees at time of sale to Uber.
his contract to sell w uber had a significant earn out, the 680m was based on hitting different tech milestones. He hit none of them before he was fired.
Why would you ever “sell” a company under such conditions? “We pay you $1T if you write a simple loop in the next two days.” Next day when you come to work: “Fired LOL. Do not cross Start, do not collect $1T.”
While this is a crazy example, I have been in very similar kind of position (not $1T for a loop, though) and been worried about the strong motivation to get rid of me on certain N+364 day timelines. It didn't happen and I was treated quite honorably. I think if you want your acquisitions to go well, you don't do cheesy stuff like firing people to save money (when the integration is otherwise going quite well) or else your future acquisitions will be harder. People talk.
Usually you don't agree to contracts that let you be fired for the sorts of things that don't end up with you in court. Buyers, being reasonable, refuse to sign contracts where they can't fire you for being a criminal.
The difference between a court and a contract like that is that the court is impartial and has a clear bar of criminality ("innocent until proven guilty" to some standard of proof), whereas it's always in the company's interest to fire you at a mere accusation of a potential crime (or non-criminal wrongdoing)...
Which is why, when you're selling a company for hundreds of millions of dollars in unvested stock, you don't sign a deal where the buyer can fire you for "mere accusations of a potential crime". Uber lost the lawsuit with Google and had to pay a quarter of a billion dollars. I'm sure their contract said something like "if you have materially misrepresented information to us that results in us getting sued for a quarter of a billion dollars, we can fire you".
Because that's a trick that only works once for the buyer so you know they're not going to pull it. It may not even work that one time because you'll tie them up in court.
I don't know what the CGT situation is in America, but in Australia of you own an asset (shares, property, etc) for less than 12 months before sale, capital gains tax kicks up to about 50%.
If you own things and sell them for a capital loss you get a tax credit to use later.
If you sell for a capital gain within 12 months then you will pay tax on the full amount of profit from the sale. For individuals this is just added to your income tax.
If you sell for a capital gain having held the asset for over 12 months you get a 50% discount to how much profit is taxed.
The tax credit for a capital loss can be used to offset a capital gain but it gets applied before any discount is applied.
I am not an accountant but I have listened to one.
That sounds essentially similar to the US system except that the US long-term capital gains tax rates are not exactly 50% of income rates. They're 0% of income rates on the low end, approximately 53-68% in most of the middle tax brackets, and 64% at the high end.
Typically you have to hold assets for a year for them to be taxed as capital gains. Otherwise it's just normal income, which caps out at 37%. Capital gains maximum rate is 20%.
Pedantically, the max cap gains rate is 23.8% with NIIT. (Also, these are the federal tax brackets; states can and mostly do impose additional taxes on both income and capital gains.)
CGT operates by treating net capital gains as taxable income in the tax year in which an asset is sold or otherwise disposed of. If an asset is held for at least 1 year then any gain is first discounted by 50% for individual taxpayers, or by 33.3% for superannuation funds. Capital losses can be offset against capital gains. Net capital losses in a tax year cannot be offset against normal income, but may be carried forward indefinitely.
For most CGT events, your capital gain is the difference between your capital proceeds and the cost base of your CGT asset. (The cost base of a CGT asset is largely what you paid for it, together with some other costs associated with acquiring, holding and disposing of it.)
There are three methods for working out your capital gain. You can choose the method that gives you the best result – that is, the smallest capital gain.
CGT discount method
Eligibility: For assets held for 12 months or more before the relevant CGT event.
Not available to companies.
For foreign resident individuals, the 50% discount is removed or reduced on capital gains made after 8 May 2012.
Description: Allows you to reduce your capital gain by
50% for resident individuals (including partners in partnerships) and trusts
33.33% for complying super funds and eligible life insurance companies.
How to do it: Subtract the cost base from the capital proceeds, deduct any capital losses, then reduce by the relevant discount percentage.
See: The discount method.
Indexation method
Eligibility – For assets
acquired before 11.45am (by legal time in the ACT) on 21 September 1999
held for 12 months or more before the relevant CGT event.
Description: Allows you to increase the cost base by applying an indexation factor based on the consumer price index (CPI) up to September 1999.
How to do it: Apply the relevant indexation factor, then subtract the indexed cost base from the capital proceeds.
See: The indexation method.
Other method
Eligibility: For assets held for less than 12 months before the relevant CGT event.
Description: Basic method of subtracting the cost base from the capital proceeds.
How to do it: Subtract the cost base (or the amount specified by the relevant CGT event) from the capital proceeds.
See: The 'other' method.
The total deal with Uber was worth about 20M upfront. The rest was milestone driven. Milestones didn’t happen bc Anthony got fired and there was a fatality that shut the program down.
Or maybe he off-shored the rest of his money? This < $100mil are the assets that are under his name and the rest are in tax havens/under different shell companies? Not sure whether that is possible. But it seems like rich people always have multiple ways of hiding their money.
This is a mid-century Hollywood myth that just won't die. Even when it was still possible to do so, a tiny, tiny minority of Rich Americans were actually evading taxes by hiding money overseas.
Today, it's virtually impossible to hide money overseas as an American after FATCA and various other crackdowns unless you are willing to entirely give up your US citizenship. Since the $USD is the reserve currency of the world, the US government has enormous leverage in mandating foreign banks to report on the assets of every single US citizen with money abroad.
In fact, foreign banks are so scared right now, many will refuse to even deal with Americans outright. It's a huge draconian nightmare for expats--99% of whom are not rich by any means.
Ironically, if you're looking to do something nefarious, the best place to do so is actually right here in the US! Numerous states allow you to create anonymous corporations and trusts.
- Beer virus is about to eat Seattle and SF Bay Area. If it does... then it will eat all the US eventually. Hospitals overrun etc. People won't be working. Most disruptive event since WW2.
- Supply chains run dry mid April. Huge supply shock... and will be arriving right as the beer virus starts to crush the west coast.
No one has a risk model that can price those things. It's entirely possible large institutions will go insolvent in the chaos.
Seems like a pretty big assumption that those two cities would be eaten. It's definitely spreading and causing disruption, but I don't really see how it's going to grind both cities to a halt. Especially with the current amount of information we have regarding the virus. We need to know more before we can draw such conclusions. China seems to be recovering already.
I think GP is referring to Florida’s generous homestead exception, which allows a debtor to keep his/her home (regardless of opulence) despite creditors’ claims.
Maybe for cases like this that involve literally millions of dollars, but it really helps normal people from becoming homeless if they fall on hard times for whatever reason.
Source: Family members went through bankruptcy in Florida and were able to get back on their feet much quicker because their house couldn't be seized.
Most states have a homestead exemption. But most states also have a limit on the value of that homestead.
Sure, you shouldn't lose your reasonable family home over debt. But that doesn't mean people like OJ Simpson should be able to keep their multi million dollar estates even though they have filed for bankruptcy.
It's a little more complicated than that and it's also $100k for married couples and goes up if you are elderly.
In order for a creditor to take a lien on your home after a bankruptcy proceeding in CA, I believe they need to prove that after a Sheriff's sale (which generally does not get market value), there will be more than the exemption limit left over after all the mortgage and taxes and fees are paid.
If they can't then they won't be able to levy your home and force a sale. So in a worst case scenario, you would need to take out an additional mortgage or heloc on the available equity in your home to bring the total available equity under the exemption limit ($75k+) and then pay that money towards the bankruptcy debt.
So basically what is happening, is you get to keep your home, but you are forfeiting all you home owner's equity that exceeds the exemption limit.
And even in this case. Does Anthony Levandowski deserve to become homeless and destitute for what he did? No.
This is going to hurt him far, far more than what he did could ever have hurt Google. Yeah, maybe Google would have lost more than this on paper, but definitely not in terms of marginal utility. Google remains an extremely wealthy and powerful company and now Anthony is broke.
Fraud? What? This trial hasn’t even gone to court. You’re making blanket statements about someone’s life based on accusations from a Big Tech company and their PR teams. This person has been accused -not convicted and is going bankrupt because he is fighting Google. I know this is a Bay Area forum - half of you probably work for Google but give me a break. They steal personal information from everyone who uses their products every single day. They buy up an competition - they don’t play fair. They are the largest advertising company in the world - let’s not pretend like they’re more than that. Or they are some virtuous company that wouldn’t personally go after someone who is a threat to them and working with a competitor. Destroying others so theirs is positioned to raise 2 Billion dollars. This guy just got caught in the crossfire. This is just parroting headlines.
Ah, the American "ooga booga" defense. You can never really know anything, since everything is speculation! This is just lawyer-speak!
There is moral hazard written all over this, and you are either too naive to see it or are trying to defend the stacked kangaroo courts of American criminal proceedings for employees of large multinational corporations.
We know that the guy stole proprietary technology and maybe there might have been intentions to use it by Uber, BUT there's no proof tying it to Uber (of course). As always. These guys aren't dumb enough to make the mistakes that Microsoft made in the 90's.
Remember you may be able to claim an exemption on your $5m estate but you need to pay the taxes and electric bill and it’s hard to do that when up to 75% of anything you make beyond minimum wage is garnished (I don’t think any state even allows this much but maybe). To be fair some states only allow up to 25%. And some states you cannot garnish at all, you can only levy bank accounts
I'm not sure how serious your were with the comment, but law enforcement and customs agencies around the world hold now considerable amounts of bitcoins.
> Levandowski just filed for bankruptcy saying he has less than $100M in assets . Does anyone know if he will only pay a percentage or is only delaying this by kicking the can down the road to another court ?
If he has less than $100M in assets, then he will only pay a portion of the judgment. If he, his lawyer and his accountant were smart, he would have moved most of his assets into trust funds, iras and other judgment proof assets. Like Epstein did to protect his wealth from civil lawsuits of the rape victims.
> I would be highly surprised if his employer (Uber) shouldered any of the this
Uber fired him 3 years ago. If they were willing to shoulder the costs, they wouldn't have fired him.
I saw the John Oliver show on televangelists. But TAHT is accepted as an official church? Really? Humans in support of AI working on a peaceful transition yo humans and machines ruling the world?
But hey, if it helps to hide away millions of dollar, I guess why not?
No but creditors would be able to seize assets from this. Bankruptcy (most commonly Chapter 7 or Chapter 11) allow for protections of certain personal property, such as one's house. But the rest of your assets will essentially be vaporized by creditors: This is the whole point of bankruptcy protection. You don't have enough to pay so-and-so and you fear you will never have enough, or that the debt load is so great, you will never be able to pay the debt. So you file bankruptcy, give everything you DO have to creditors, and by law will be able to at least retain assets like a primary house, or at least it will buy time to stop foreclosure and repossession by a creditor (like a bank or other lender). But even then, if you still can't later on afford to get current on the home with on-going income, you would eventually lose the house, too.
My layman's understanding is it depends on the underlying reason for the legal judgment. When fraud was involved it is supposedly harder to discharge a judgement in bankruptcy.
Didn’t he make tens of millions at Google as an employee as well? That is a lot of money to blow through (plus) assuming a nice chunk of Uber stock from Otto.
This is what I find so baffling - he didn't need the money and it seems like the whole Otto pursuit had a significant enough downside risk for someone who was already quite wealthy that I'm surprised he was willing to take it.
The website (which consists of exactly one static page) is still up. Did it ever go anywhere?
They used to have a signup form for a newsletter. It disappeared.
And bankruptcy doesn't actually discharge the debt if you have assets-- it just gives you breathing room and a formal legal structure to work with creditors on just what % is possible, who gets paid first, second, etc.
One previous fraud man once told me when you acquire money through fraud, spend it all on powerful people who can reciprocate those favours later when all your assets are seized.
They can confiscate the money/assets, can they stop the barters who of which they've no records?
Anthony Levandowski, the engineer and autonomous vehicle startup founder who was at the center of a trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, has been ordered to pay $179 million to end a contract dispute over his departure from Google.
Reuters was the first to report the court order.
An arbitration panel ruled in December that Levandowski and Lior Ron had engaged in unfair competition and breached their contract with Google when they left the company to start a rival autonomous vehicle company focused on trucking, called Otto. Uber acquired Otto in 2017. A San Francisco County court confirmed Wednesday the panel’s decision.
Ron settled last month with Google for $9.7 million. However, Levandowski, had disputed the ruling. The San Francisco County Superior Court denied his petition today, granting Google’s petition to hold Levandowski to the arbitration agreement under which he was liable.
Levandowski himself may not have to pay the money personally, as this sort of liability may fall to his employer depending on his contract or other legal quirks. However, Levandowski personally filed today for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, stating that the presumptive $179M debt quite exceeds his assets, which he estimates at somewhere between $50M and $100M.
A representative for Levandowski declined comment for this story.
Meh. What commercial product has the guy ever released? I’ve been involved in many and I can tell you that with each one of them I knew exactly what I would do differently the next time. I didn’t need an old design because I knew what we needed to do without having to refer to the old design. If this guy was so brilliant he wouldn’t have stolen because he’d have known how to make the design better.
Rather I think he stole the designs for expediency out of greed.
>"However, Levandowski personally filed today for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, stating that the presumptive $179M debt quite exceeds his assets, which he estimates at somewhere between $50M and $100M."
Could someone with a legal background say what this means in practical terms? Stating you have assets worth "between $50M and $100M" while declaring bankruptcy obviously looks absurd on it's face but I'm guessing there's much more to this?
I have nowhere close to a legal background, but I think I understand what's going on here.
First, there's zero incentives for him to be precise. If the upper bound is far below his debts, he'll end up with zero regardless of whether he owns 50M or 100M or 150M.
There are incentives for him to be right. Putting incorrect numbers in a legal document is a faux pass at best, and at worse can be assumed to be malicious.
Well, $100M is a lot less than $197M. Bankruptcy doesn't mean "out of money" it means that you have debts that you have no way of paying. I would expect a bankruptcy court to force him to liquidate almost all of that $100M to pay the judgement. I don't know if an arbitration judgement like this can be discharged through bankruptcy, some judgements and penalties cannot.
There are provisions in some places as to what can be taken by bankruptcy. Then there are laws about what debts can be wiped out by bankruptcy. I suspect it’s a more general question, will he be broke after this with a crappy reputation and no money or will he be “broke” and live in a multimillion dollar castle with a support staff and get around in last year’s S-class rather than this year’s hotness?
A friend of mine heard his personal attorney speak at a law school class. Even his attorney thought Anthony was a “jackass” for stealing the IP; his defense fell on him being an engineer who, at the end of the day, just wanted to build cool shit and wasn’t malicious.
Note that this is Levandowski's defence. "I did copy those files but only because I love tech, I would never deliberately steal IP, I'm really sorry about all this". What else could he do, he clearly copied the files so claiming he didn't wasn't going to work.
So his lawyer is just maintaining the same position that he did in court, otherwise this would be outrageous.
He's cashed in on this theft to the tune of "$50m-$100m" what would it take to constitute mallace?
Sure, he's not building war weapons or anything like that, but he stole the IP and he made an F* ton of money from it, specifically selling it to competitors. That seems like about the only malicious thing you could do with that IP, if you ask me. Being not malicious would be if it did that for free.
What are the odds that he ends up living kind of normal after this? Like living in the suburbs in a 2500sqft house and commuting to some job that pays $130k? I think close to nil.
That'd be some interview. "Could you tell us about a time when you had to resolve a difficult issue? Say when you nicked IP from Google and had to pay $179M as restitution? And could you then explain why we should trust you within a hundred miles of our IP?"
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here, regardless of how many millions someone has or you feel they have. This sort of comment is an internet trope that leads nowhere interesting.
Primary residence in Florida is shielded from bankruptcy and creditors. Also retirement accounts (both IRAs and 401ks). Lease your expensive ride and you’re mostly judgement proof.
Probably, it is not uncommon for people to dump large sums of money into renovations to their property before a bankruptcy.
Although I would imagine if it was very egregious, like $1m toilets when essentially no one else has anything reasonably close to that, that a judge would probably strike that down and require you to liquidate it.
Now I'm wondering if people retire in Florida to avoid retirement accounts and residences from being reclaimed during bankruptcy. Sounds like a great recipe for scam artists, TBH.
People retire in Florida because it's warm and there's no state income tax to double dip on your investment or other income. Great creditor protections is a second order effect.
So what? Bankruptcy courts weren't born yesterday; I'm sure they're familiar with that problem. And Google has reasonably strong incentives to collect as much of that $180M as they can, too.
Uber paid that. As mentioned in the Reuters article -
Waymo confirmed that Uber had paid the $9.7 million owed by Ron, as Uber indemnifies workers under its employment agreements. But Uber had said in financial filings that it expects to challenge paying for Levandowski, who is fighting a federal indictment on charges of stealing trade secrets from Google.
So did lewendowski when the event in question took place.
They are technically on the hook for his too but they will definitely try to argue that since an actual crime took place, their indemnity only goes so far. And I'm sure there is some language to that effect in their policies as well.
What the case was about is employee mobility, competition, and the onerous employee agreements with secretive and punitive arbitration clauses that Big Tech forces their employees to sign. So yes, Anthony may have lost his case but that’s because all employees - especially high prized ones like him - are forced into these agreements and play on an uneven playing field. Thankfully there have been recent improvements in easing these when it comes to sexual harrasment, of which Google is a major violator and leading example, but don’t kid yourself the problem is not solved. In all other respects all tech workers are subject to these super stringent employment terms and secretive arbitrations controlled by the tech giants. And if they can try and destroy a big deal employee like Anthony like this, what hope is there for the average tech worker.
"Even the Levandowskis’ nanny assumed a minor role in the drama, when she filed a multimillion-dollar suit of her own, claiming that Anthony had been emotionally abusive to her, and that he had a drawer that was filled with sex toys. (The lawsuit, which offered no evidence of her claims and contained multiple factual errors, was eventually dropped.)"
I obviously can do the math, but is there anyway this guy is not financially completely ruined now? I kinda always assume when you get into the 100M+ range, you can fuck up but still not go to zero (aka you have houses, cars, land etc that google can claw back)
Bit unrelated, but could somebody highlight the comma splices mentioned in the comments section? As a non-native english speaker, I can’t notice anything out of the ordinary.
The second comma is unneeded. It’s not a comma splice though.
There are some really long sentences with awkward commas, but I believe they’re grammatically correct. It would just be better to break them into multiple sentences.
It's like reading (a method (like an algorithm (after the scholar Al-Khwarizmi) of communication, but see [2]), except maybe the braces don't quite match).
“ However, Levandowski personally filed today for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, stating that the presumptive $179M debt quite exceeds his assets, which he estimates at somewhere between $50M and $100M.”
I’m not an English expert, but I am a native speaker. Although the above sentence is understandable, when you look at it closer the sentence structure is a bit wonky. Anecdotally, I don’t like starting a sentence with “However,”, and this article has that twice. I think it is that kind of style where the author is making a statement and then forcing you to hold it in memory, so to speak, is what the commenter is referring to. It gets mentally taxing to keep track of all of the threads.
While that style might not be to everyone’s taste, that sentence definitely is grammatically correct and does not have any comma splices. Personally I don’t find it that awkward either.
Is is really meaningful, as a defence, to say a sentence is grammatically correct, if the meaning is unclear or the style is wretched?
Instead we should ask, if a sentence is unclear and wretchedly wrought, what purpose is served in pointing out its grammatical correctness? That is like admiring a two legged horse.
The author was no doubt under a tight deadline and just bashing it out with even less thought than I give to this post, but nevertheless has an MSc in Journalism (how is that an MSc?) and a BA, and can surely do better.
Usually when people think they're "just overtly shaming", they're also posting flamebait. Please leave the online callout/shaming culture behind when you step in here, and follow the site guidelines regardless of how you feel about appalling behavior. You may not owe Google better, but you owe the community better if you're posting here.
Agreed. However, "improper secret management" does not accurately describe Levandowski's actions, and one could argue that he did abuse his power at the expense of others.
Yeah that's a super charitable description. Stealing bitcoin private keys and then using them to kickstart your own venture? "Improper secrets management"
Saying "hey lets hook up or you won't get that promotion" is also loss of wealth and personal embarrassment so to me it's roughly equal with a bit of a bias against Rubin.
But they acquired Android and he probably had some deep legalese and contracts preserving his golden parachute, can't really claw those back unless some really bad news comes out.
Sorry if this seems completely wacko to you but that's how I see it.
..."Levandowski himself may not have to pay the money personally, as this sort of liability may fall to his employer depending on his contract or other legal quirks."
You can see immediately below that he personally filed for bankruptcy. Now when rich people do this it doesn't always mean the same thing as when ordinary people do it, but it seems unlikely that he would need to take that step if he had no liability.
Seems out of proportion given 1) Google was willing to settle for <$10M with Ron and 2) Equifax only paid ~2x for leaking pretty much 50% of the SSNs in the country[1]...
Does it? The guy says he has $50M-$100M and it seems like most (all?) of that came from selling Otto to Uber. And he intentionally didn't settle. Seems like if the value of the sell was based on Google's IP which he had contracted to not share, then this is not really an unexpected outcome?
The difference is that Lewandowski realized the value of the IP with the sale of the company. If the jury decides trade secrets made up x% of the company, he owes that percent of his proceeds. IMO, IANAL.
Arbitration panel, in this case. The real answer is that the legal system is not set up to keep a globally consistent harm_done->liability map. For one thing, the contents of employment contracts may lead to different damages in otherwise identical circumstances. For another thing, even if the circumstances were identical, it would be inefficient for justices to have to search every other possible case to make sure they are consistent with each other one. The law is a fuzzy rule system, not a perfect logical construct.
When the fine is already > than his net worth does it make sense to increase it further? The actual impact on him won't change, and no more money will actually be recovered.
Are ML model parameters copyrightable? Should it be? To me, it looks like that is the only claim google has - rest of the algorithms are all open sourced already.
Honestly, I don’t see much difference between this and the oracle java case. Google can’t have it both ways.
This case involved technology that even hardcore critics of intellectual property rights would presumably consider "classic" patents. The LIDAR hardware was one of the major items, IIRC.
I don't remember anything about ML and especially not model parameters. But, yes, I'm somewhat sure those would meet the criteria for copyright.
What's far more interesting is the copyright status of the output of ML models: does it meet the required "creativity" when it's just the product of a computation you set up once, a long time ago? And is the ML model's creator still close enough to the product to be considered its author? If your text generator was trained on Wikipedia data, are the wikipedia authors co-creators? This stuff is going to be fun...
It's been amusing to hear his story. Starting a church/religion was my favorite part.
I bet Google and a bunch of other companies are excited about the message this sends to other arrogant engineers who might be considering leaving and building new companies with ideas developed at their prior places of employment. That precedent is worth billions if not trillions.
"building new companies with ideas developed at their prior places of employment" is VERY different from copying files and stealing IP. The former is the reason Silicon Valley is what it is today.
The Traitorous Eight (the highest profile case of what the OP was describing) is one of my favorite Silicon Valley stories. If you haven't read about it, you really should! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight
I'm not asserting he did either, there is a lot of grey there for sure. I'm saying that's the message a lot of people will hear from this result, for better or worse (my opinion is worse, but it's nothing more than my opinion). I think we agree here.
This is harmful to innovation in the Bay Area. Big Tech eats up all the talent and now sends the signal that they can’t leave. The trial hasn’t even begun for this case - I think they’re still debating what constitutes a trade secret. This seems personal. Google got angry that one of their “own” went to a competitor.
I bet this will make companies think twice about acquiring startups founded by Google employees.
Anthony brought self driving tech to Google, and that's why we have Waymo. Him leaving was an actual competitive threat to them. Look at Don Burnette and others who have since left. Google doesn't give a shit about them and they have AV companies that have raised millions of dollars.
I don't know what IP is in question, but it seems to me that he had been working in AVs longer than almost anyone in the industry, so it's believable that Uber was valuing the Otto team's accumulated experience, rather than any stolen ideas.
This is completely misleading. Even if his first company was the first self driving vehicle project ever (which was not) or the only piece in the puzzle (which it wasn't either), there were other cofounders of that startup. This is glorifying one person using other people's work.
It was the first self-driving car project to cause established companies to take notice and start investing heavily, kickstarting the industry, which was my point.
Other co-founders, yes, but Anthony was overall product lead. The article goes into detail.
