Elaine Ou, Columnist

In Google's Fight With Uber, Everyone Loses

Intellectual-property litigation is only for dinosaurs.

April 12, 2017 at 11:00 AM UTC

Elaine Ou is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a blockchain engineer at Global Financial Access in San Francisco. Previously she was a lecturer in the electrical and information engineering department at the University of Sydney.

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Uber is currently in trouble for, well, a lot of things, but one particularly problematic thing is the claim that the ride-hailing company acquired trade secrets stolen from Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc. It’s also a case where Uber isn’t the one behaving badly.

According to a lawsuit filed by Waymo, employees swiped files describing proprietary self-driving technology just before leaving to start a competing company. The startup, Otto, existed for all of seven months before it was acquired by Uber Technologies Inc. During this time, Google’s car project experienced a larger employee exodus, with many key players leaving to start or join new companies. So whatever happens, it’s looking like Google has already lost the battle.