What Google Hopes to Gain by Suing Uber

The legal battle that's starting between Waymo, the self-driving car spin-off of Google's former "moonshot" unit, and ride-hailing giant Uber appears to be all about trade secrets and patents. But there is a bigger issue behind it: Silicon Valley ethics and employee loyalty.

The Waymo lawsuit contends that a former employee, Anthony Levandowski, downloaded 9.7 gigabytes of sensitive data about the company's proprietary self-driving system, in particular its main element -- the LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) system, which scans the car's environment with lasers and feeds information to software that makes driving decisions. He then left Google -- after drawing his multimillion-dollar bonus -- and set up his own company, Otto. Within months, he sold it to Uber for $680 million, enabling Uber to catch up immediately on years of research and development.