According to court records, Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Waymo tried to seek arbitration with a former employee who is accused of stealing trade secrets from Google’s autonomous car unit and which Uber is said to have used for its self-driving car ambitions. Uber is now saying that this strengthens its bid to have the case arbitrated instead of going through a court process.
The court documents which had been filed by the ride-hailing services firm indicated that on October 28, 2016, Waymo sought arbitration with Anthony Levandowski, its former employee, over claims that the engineer made use of confidential information in order to recruit workers to his new employer.
“[Levandowski] improperly used Waymo’s confidential information to induce Waymo employees to join a competing driverless-car enterprise,” alleged Google.
Levandowski had been a long-time Google employee before he quit to start Otto, a driverless car firm that he later sold to Uber.
Poaching strategy
Some of the confidential information that Levandowski allegedly used included how much Waymo employees earned. With this he was able to make well-targeted salary offers in order to lure them to his new company. The fact that the trade-secret allegations were left out in the arbitration effort is now a sore point for Uber.
The dispute between the two firms begun in February this year and the battle expected to last months. Each of the two companies wants to be the pioneer in making autonomous cars a mass product in a nascent sector that is promising to offer massive opportunities for players in both the auto and technology industries. Uber is thought to prefer arbitration since it could help keep the acrimonious battle away from the public eye.
Lidar System
In the trade secrets lawsuit, Google claims that Levandowski engaged in an act of stealing 14,000 confidential files which he had downloaded. Some of the files contained details on the ranging sensor technology that is commonly referred to as Lidar, which is a critical component in self-driving cars. It was only after these files were in his possession that he left Google.
On Wednesday shares of Alphabet Inc rose by 1.10% to close the day at $849.87 a share.
