The United States Attorney’s office in San Jose, California, recently indicted Uber Technologies, Inc.’s former autonomous driving car guru, Anthony Levandowski, with thirty-three counts of trade secrets theft in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§1832(a)-(d). The indictment was only released on August 27, 2019, after being unsealed by the federal district court judge presiding over the case.
This criminal case is a child case of the civil matter between Waymo, LLC and Uber. Waymo, the self-driving car project of Google, Inc, and later became a full stand-alone subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc., the parent company which includes Google, sued Uber in 2017 for patent infringement and trade secrets misappropriations. That case settled in 2018, but not before the judge in the case, Hon. William Alsup allowed the unusual litigation procedure of permitting a criminal investigation into Levandowski’s attempts to hide his trade secret misappropriation from court testimony by claiming Fifth Amendment protection. The criminal allegations in this present indictment stems from Judge Alsup’s order in the Waymo v. Uber case. A related discovery issue in this case also went to the Federal Circuit, before being found in favor of Waymo and against Levandowski.[1]
Levandowski was the former head of the Waymo self-driving project while at Google, and subsequently left to found the startup Otto Trucking. Otto was later acquired by Uber, and set the stage for the civil case proceeding between Waymo and Uber.
Trade secrets are the fourth major intellectual property. Trade secrets do not stem from property law, but rather contract law, and has taken several state statutes, as well as the federal one. Trade secrets must be completely confidential, used in a commercial setting, and provides that commercial entity with a competitive advantage.
[1] See Waymo LLC v. Uber Techs., Inc., writ of mandamus denied, 870 F.3d 1350 (Fed. Cir. 2017).