Anthony Levandowski Charged with Theft of Trade Secrets

Post by meowface » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 9:46 PM UTC

hintymad wrote: post #130

hintymad wrote: post #122

Why did reporters keep calling Levandowski an engineer? He's really not, at least not for quite a number of years. Anyway, Levandowski was a lousy leader, and was really detrimental to Uber's ATG. He bloated ATG from fewer than 100 people to more than 2000 within less than a year, without paying the slightest attention to culture. As a result, the number of people grossly exceeded the quantity of work. Political infi…

P.S., Levandowski caused similar drama when he was in Google's self-driving car division too, per the book Autonomy by Lawrence D Burns.

Post by brown9-2 » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

meowface wrote: post #221

hintymad wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

P.S., Levandowski caused similar drama when he was in Google's self-driving car division too, per the book Autonomy by Lawrence D Burns.

It's baffling to me how everyone seems to hate the guy and say he was a terrible leader, employee, and person, and yet companies seemed to have been valuing him like a diamond. How did that work? Is he just good at duping and persuading and sweet-talking people? Does he have some past accomplishments that were respectable? Does he have some insight into autonomous driving no one else has? Why would Google and Uber be…

Post by jonathankoren » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 10:09 PM UTC

denzil_correa wrote: post #219

tryitnow wrote: post #207

I would have a lot more sympathy for Levandowski if he had taken trade secrets and created his own company. But he didn't take the engineer/entrepreneur route. He took the corporate espionage route and just stole stuff from one company so that another company would profit, in the process further enriching himself. At one point he was a good engineer. Then he became just another greedy executive.

> But he didn't take the engineer/entrepreneur route. He took the corporate espionage route and just stole stuff from one company so that another company would profit, in the process further enriching himself. Levandowski actually had his own startup Otto which was acquired by Uber.

Post by jonathankoren » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 10:18 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #67

javert wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I live in a poor country which is poor mostly because the established economic powers are able to strangle new centers of wealth creation in the cradle, using the government and laws. Don't let that happen in your country. Is there any country in the world that still prioritizes freedom over having a massive regulatory state? It would surprise me.

Governments do not prioritize the freedom of their subjects; it's contrary to the incentives of everyone in the government. People win freedom by limiting the powers governments have over them.

Post by xtracto » Tue, Aug 27, 2019, 10:25 PM UTC

pcwalton wrote: post #103

kragen wrote: post #44

"Theft of trade secrets" is how Silicon Valley was built. Fairchild was "theft of trade secrets" from Shockley; Intel was "theft of trade secrets" from Fairchild. When Camenzind left Signetics and designed the 555 (under contract to Signetics), he was "using trade secrets" of Signetics; in today's legal environment, they could have just ordered him to stick around as an employee and work on a less risky project. MOST…

> So this movement toward resolving such conflicts in the courts, instead of by companies competing to out-innovate one another, is very troubling. A lot of the things you cite were actually fought out in the courts. Motorola sued MOS Technology [1]. AMD and Intel have been in constant legal battles since their inception. The complicated question of Unix ownership started the famous SCO-Linux litigation. This isn't a…