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A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

wired.com

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Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#31

Post by asabjorn »

aeleos wrote: post #29
asabjorn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a lawsuit without merit took your startup from success to a below-valuation firesale, any similar situation might feel personal to you and it must feel good to do something about it.

I would understand if it was a small small startup like his that was in trouble, but even if Uber got in trouble for violating the patents, its still just research for developing self-driving cars that isn't critical to their day to day business. I am not asking why bother helping a company in a similar situation, but why bother helping a company that didn't really need helping?

Self driving cars is an existential threat to Uber if others have accesss to it while Uber doesn’t, or others have cheaper access. Why don’t you think helping Uber fighting off parent claims without merit would help?

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#32

Post by pfarnsworth »

frenchie14 wrote: post #8

> He then wrote a $6,000 personal check for the reexamination fee... “It’s definitely not a drop in the bucket for me,” he says. > Swildens tells me from his home in Los Altos Hills, near Mountain View. I can't help but feel that he's not being totally genuine here

Los Altos Hills are where Los Altans go when they get sick and tired of all the "poor" people in Los Altos.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#33

Post by seanmcdirmid »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #32
frenchie14 wrote: post #8

> He then wrote a $6,000 personal check for the reexamination fee... “It’s definitely not a drop in the bucket for me,” he says. > Swildens tells me from his home in Los Altos Hills, near Mountain View. I can't help but feel that he's not being totally genuine here

Los Altos Hills are where Los Altans go when they get sick and tired of all the "poor" people in Los Altos.

Well, it’s not like Palo Alto vs. East Palo Alto.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#34

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

Deimorz wrote: post #27
thisisit wrote: post #20

Is auto playing embedded video is becoming the new norm? I opened the link on iPad and the video on the page auto plays but on mute. Anyone else having this problem?

It's absolutely the new norm. Most news sites have an autoplaying video on almost every article now. Sometimes the video will even follow you down the page as you scroll. Even worse, sometimes the video isn't even about the same story. I guess they just desperately need to show you a video even if they don't have a very relevant one. It's terrible, and yet another reason to block almost everything by default with som…

Also a good reason to disable autoplay in your browser.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#35

Post by matt4077 »

Waymo has already dismissed the patent claims in its initial lawsuit, after getting serious pushback on it from the judge over the last year.

See, for example Footnote 2 on page 2 of http://www.almcms.com/contrib/content/uploads/documents/1/Wa...:

Defendants also moved for summary judgment of noninfringement of Waymo’s United States Patent No. 9,368,936, but Waymo’s dismissal of its patent claim moots that part of the motion

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#36

Post by realityking »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #4
realityking wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you thinking of Ask Patents? https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/09/20/askpatents-com-a-stack...

That is indeed what I’m thinking of, but for some reason I thought it was something USPTO did. Looks like it’s just Q&A now, too, sadly.

At the time it was a joint effort between StackExchange, the USPTO and the Google Patent Search team.

I just spend a couple of minutes to see when the USPTO gave up but couldn’t find anything. Maybe someone here knows?

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#37

Post by stickfigure »

Deimorz wrote: post #27
thisisit wrote: post #20

Is auto playing embedded video is becoming the new norm? I opened the link on iPad and the video on the page auto plays but on mute. Anyone else having this problem?

It's absolutely the new norm. Most news sites have an autoplaying video on almost every article now. Sometimes the video will even follow you down the page as you scroll. Even worse, sometimes the video isn't even about the same story. I guess they just desperately need to show you a video even if they don't have a very relevant one. It's terrible, and yet another reason to block almost everything by default with som…

I thought I was the last holdout, but I finally added a Chrome plugin that disables javascript on a domain-by-domain basis.

At this point I have JS disabled for pretty much every single news-related site - cnn, nytimes, bloomberg, sfgate, wsj, salon, etc... and dozens of less notable ones. It's incredible how much more usable these websites are without JS. No autoplay, no popups, no "CPU goes to 100% and scrolling takes 5s to respond". And usually it disables the paywall.

These sites are quite literally training their audience to disable Javascript.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#38

Post by golfer »

ajross wrote: post #25
dougb wrote: post #7

Makes me wonder if Travis has a connection to Eric through Akamai. Eric's company, Speedera, was also acquired by Akamai in 2005. Travis's company, RedSwoosh, was acquired by Akamai in 2007.

I'm thinking the same thing. I mean... this whole article just smells off. It's a press hit about one patent claiming that somehow this invalidates the Waymo case in a dispute that is fundamentally about trade secrets anyway. I mean, he found prior art on a LIDAR patent. Good. But... why do we care?

Wired fell for this guy's story. This feels incredibly fishy. A random guy feels sorry for Uber, the lovable plucky underdog of all companies... and invests lots of time and $6K to invalidate patents?

It just doesn't compute. There must be a tie between this guy and someone at Uber. Or it's VC backers.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#39

Post by stevenwoo »

frenchie14 wrote: post #15
saagarjha wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Swildens ended up selling Speedera at a discount to Akamai for $130 million You’re not the only one.

Well if he'd sold below valuation (and in the middle of a lawsuit to his prosecutors no less!) it would be plausible that he didn't make out well. But I don't see how one can live in Los Altos Hills without having a lot of wealth. EDIT: The comment below points out that Speedera took $51M in funding

Maybe not in this particular case, but I know someone about that age who grew up about 30 years ago off of Page Mill in the hills and he said their house was at least 20 times less than they are going for now, but sadly for him, his parents had to sell it when his family moved out of the area. This might have been before even 280 was built IIRC.

Re: A Spectator Who Threw a Wrench in the Waymo/Uber Lawsuit

#40

Post by Fricken »

ajross wrote: post #25
dougb wrote: post #7

Makes me wonder if Travis has a connection to Eric through Akamai. Eric's company, Speedera, was also acquired by Akamai in 2005. Travis's company, RedSwoosh, was acquired by Akamai in 2007.

I'm thinking the same thing. I mean... this whole article just smells off. It's a press hit about one patent claiming that somehow this invalidates the Waymo case in a dispute that is fundamentally about trade secrets anyway. I mean, he found prior art on a LIDAR patent. Good. But... why do we care?

It doesn't invalidate Waymo's whole case, just Waymo's infringement claims against patent 936. Now the case is only about trade secrets.

I'm not seeing what it is about the article that makes it a hit piece. Mark Harris, the guy who wrote it has been covering Uber, Waymo, and self driving cars for years. He's always digging up weird stuff like this. When Apple's project Titan was rumours and hearsay it was Mark Harris out there digging up tangible evidence about what was going on. Harris is pretty good at his job.

He can only report on Swildon's stated reasons for going to all the trouble he did, and Harris can't actually prove that Swildon's efforts were the real reason Waymo withdrew it's infringement claim, only that it seems that way.

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