Oof.
Anthony Levandowski ordered to pay $179M to Google
151–160 of 246 posts
Re: Anthony Levandowski ordered to pay $179M to Google
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
That covers the civil side of things, but GPs point about criminal charges still applies. Yeah, they might have signed an NDA but I don't think those can restrict what can be uncovered during discovery (but I could be wrong -- IANAL).
Sure, but I'm sure some prosecutor took a look at it and decided it wasn't worthwhile. People get killed in accidents all the time, and frequently nobody gets charged with anything. A person being killed in a car accident while jaywalking at night because the driver wasn't paying attention particularly well is a story as old as cars, and usually doesn't result in jail time. Turns out, people are legally allowed to dr…
Prosecutors, even high profile/positioned ones, have a finite amount of resources. At the end of the day it might be romantic to go after a megacorp but a prosecutor's job is to persue justice against criminals, you might get a few high profile executive types and justice for one family (if you're the type to consider beyond the defendant) but with those same resources and time you could probably lock up at least twenty violent, in the real way, deadbeats. I'm not saying that's the way it should be, but I think it's worth acknowledging because it's why the problem is hard to solve. Everyone wants to see big fish getting hard time, but reality looks more like Harvey Dent's speech to Commissioner Gordon and that's for the good prosecutors.
Re: Anthony Levandowski ordered to pay $179M to Google
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you ever “sell” a company under such conditions? “We pay you $1T if you write a simple loop in the next two days.” Next day when you come to work: “Fired LOL. Do not cross Start, do not collect $1T.”
Usually you don't agree to contracts that let you be fired for the sorts of things that don't end up with you in court. Buyers, being reasonable, refuse to sign contracts where they can't fire you for being a criminal.
The difference between a court and a contract like that is that the court is impartial and has a clear bar of criminality ("innocent until proven guilty" to some standard of proof), whereas it's always in the company's interest to fire you at a mere accusation of a potential crime (or non-criminal wrongdoing)...
Re: Anthony Levandowski ordered to pay $179M to Google
#154A friend of mine heard his personal attorney speak at a law school class. Even his attorney thought Anthony was a “jackass” for stealing the IP; his defense fell on him being an engineer who, at the end of the day, just wanted to build cool shit and wasn’t malicious.
His attorney should STFU about cases in progress to people who are not in any way involved in the suit. Levandowski may be a jackass but that lawyer is not much better.
If he did say anything like that I'd agree with you but this is most likely distorted through retelling.
Re: Anthony Levandowski ordered to pay $179M to Google
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Levandowski just filed for bankruptcy saying he has less than $100M in assets . Does anyone know if he will only pay a percentage or is only delaying this by kicking the can down the road to another court ? If he has less than $100M in assets, then he will only pay a portion of the judgment. If he, his lawyer and his accountant were smart, he would have moved most of his assets into trust funds, iras and other judg…
Levandowski started a Church, around the time shit started to fall around him. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of his money is hiding there.
A church? If that isn't a crooked move, I don't know what is. Kind of fits the picture, so.
Re: Anthony Levandowski ordered to pay $179M to Google
#156It feels perverse that when Uber's stolen technology killed a pedestrian, nobody was held liable and in fact no charges were pressed and no civil lawsuits were filed. But the person who stole that technology was indicted and is getting financially destroyed.
They never actually used the stolen tech, right? It wasn't good enough. They hit the pedestrian solely on their own tech, which (clearly, in hindsight) wasn't good enough either.
It wasn't disclosed on whether stolen IP was used - Uber had (still have?) to cooperate with Waymo, inspecting their hardware and software stack.
The pedestrian ultimately got hit because a lot of fallback systems failed: They disabled the software's ability to emergency-break (1), they disabled the cars' systems to emergency break, and the operator of the vehicle was distracted, not reacting in time.
(1) This was actually done due to false-positives, i.e. the car slamming on the breaks in non-emergency cases. (I find that's a relevant point, because without that detail it just sounds more ludicrous than it already is).
Re: Anthony Levandowski ordered to pay $179M to Google
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how he doesn't have more assets after he sold his company to Uber for $680 millions
>I wonder how he doesn't have more assets after he sold his company to Uber for $680 millions He may have realized early that Bitcoin is unconfiscatable.
I'm not sure how serious your were with the comment, but law enforcement and customs agencies around the world hold now considerable amounts of bitcoins.
Re: Anthony Levandowski ordered to pay $179M to Google
#158One previous fraud man once told me when you acquire money through fraud, spend it all on powerful people who can reciprocate those favours later when all your assets are seized.
They can confiscate the money/assets, can they stop the barters who of which they've no records?
Re: Anthony Levandowski ordered to pay $179M to Google
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
They never actually used the stolen tech, right? It wasn't good enough. They hit the pedestrian solely on their own tech, which (clearly, in hindsight) wasn't good enough either.
It wasn't disclosed on whether stolen IP was used - Uber had (still have?) to cooperate with Waymo, inspecting their hardware and software stack. The pedestrian ultimately got hit because a lot of fallback systems failed: They disabled the software's ability to emergency-break (1), they disabled the cars' systems to emergency break, and the operator of the vehicle was distracted, not reacting in time. (1) This was ac…
The IP wasn't the problem in the accident, rather the implementation. Simplified, the software was tuned in favor of ignoring obstacles as false positives. By the time the system acknowledged the immediate danger it was too late. No tech, no matter how good the IP, could stand up to being tweaked like this.
And the emergency breaking relied on the human operator but the system was not designed to warn the operator.
Re: Anthony Levandowski ordered to pay $179M to Google
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Usually you don't agree to contracts that let you be fired for the sorts of things that don't end up with you in court. Buyers, being reasonable, refuse to sign contracts where they can't fire you for being a criminal.
The difference between a court and a contract like that is that the court is impartial and has a clear bar of criminality ("innocent until proven guilty" to some standard of proof), whereas it's always in the company's interest to fire you at a mere accusation of a potential crime (or non-criminal wrongdoing)...
Which is why, when you're selling a company for hundreds of millions of dollars in unvested stock, you don't sign a deal where the buyer can fire you for "mere accusations of a potential crime". Uber lost the lawsuit with Google and had to pay a quarter of a billion dollars. I'm sure their contract said something like "if you have materially misrepresented information to us that results in us getting sued for a quarter of a billion dollars, we can fire you".