What Google Is Trying To Prove In The Uber Lawsuit

In what one recent  article said is likely to be “one of the biggest legal battles since the war between Apple and Samsung over smartphones,” there may be even more at stake than intellectual property, according to Bloomberg View columnist Leonid Bershidsky. In the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in San Francisco, Waymo (a subsidiary of Alphabet, formerly Google) is suing Uber, which acquired a self-driving truck company called Otto. Waymo contends that a former Google employee, Anthony Levandowski, downloaded confidential technical information – gigabytes of it – before he left the company to found Otto, which Uber then acquired. Bershidsky writes that if Google is technically right, “it likely brought on its problem itself,” because Google – as well as the other Silicon Valley giants – has made poaching part of its modus operandi. But Google stands out, he says. He points to a recent analysis by a tech recruitment company, which found Google had hired a total of 12,798 employees from other firms. The reality, according to Bershidsky, is that engineers who generate breakthrough innovations are just guests at the big companies, “seduced into keeping still for a few years with lavish payments and nice working conditions.” Then question then arises: How do you keep them from migrating? “One way,” Bershidsky says, “is to become more litigious.”