18 months in prison sentenced to an engineer who stole the secret of an automatic driving car from Google

by torbakhopper

Engineer Anthony Levandowski, who was charged with 33 charges of stealing trade secrets related to self-driving cars, was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Ex-Google Engineer Levandowski's Jump to Uber Ends in Prison-Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-04/ex-google-engineer-levandowski-s-jump-to-uber-ends-in-prison

Former Google exec Anthony Levandowski sentenced to 18 months for stealing self-driving car secrets-The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/4/21354906/anthony-levandowski-waymo-uber-lawsuit-sentence-18-months-prison-lawsuit

Levandowski is known for learning about self-driving car technology at the University of California, Berkeley and starting an autonomous driving development project with Google co-founder Larry Page . Levandowski was a person who was hoped for the future because he was also involved in the 'DARPA contest' in which people who will open up the future of autonomous driving related technology participated.

Excellent brains that pull the world of self-driving cars are all graduates of the ``DARPA contest''-GIGAZINE

After being involved in launching Waymo , which was a spin-out of Google's self-driving car development department, Levandowski retired from Google in January 2016 and started a self-driving truck startup ``Otto with engineers who worked as colleagues at Google. Was established. In just two months, Otto was acquired by Uber for about $700 million.

Uber acquires self-driving truck 'Otto' & launches self-driving taxi in collaboration with Volvo later this month-GIGAZINE

However, Waymo filed a lawsuit against Levandowski, Otto, and Uber in 2017 for 'stealing intellectual property.' According to Waymo, Levandowski stole more than 14,000 files from Waymo and illegally transferred them to a laptop. Uber provided 0.34% of the stake to Waymo and Google's parent company, Alphabet, to settle and lay off Levandowski.

Simultaneously with the lawsuit, the Federal District Attorney's Office in Northern California charged Levandowski for theft of trade secrets. However, Levandowski did not admit to theft of intellectual property, and appeared in federal court in San Jose, California on August 27, 2019 and acquitted him. He was released on bail by paying $300,000 bail and using Levandowski's parents and friends' home as collateral.

Former Google engineer prosecuted for stealing self-driving car-related data-GIGAZINE

by Dllu

Levandowski refused to submit related documents due to the fifth amendment , but in March 2020, a judicial transaction saying 'Instead of withdrawing up to 32 out of 33 charges, we will accept one of them' Agreed to. I admitted to the charges that 'I downloaded a trade secret from Waymo and used it after leaving work.'

Judge William Alsup in the San Francisco Federal District Court, who was in charge of the case, repeatedly praised Levandowski as 'the best engineer I know' in his judgment, and added: ' It's the largest trade secret offense in my decades of career as a judge.' Levandowski imprisoned for 18 months, and Waymo paid 756,499 dollars (about 80 million yen) as compensation for investigation costs, and paid $95,000 (about 1 million yen) as a fine. , And ordered a speech entitled 'Why did I end up in federal prison?'

In addition to the above fine, Levan de Fusuki is the 179 million dollars (about 190 billion yen) as was unjustly pulled the engineer to pay to Waymo was imposed for, has been expected to declare soon bankrupt.

At a hearing on August 4, 2020, Levandowski apologized to his former betrayed Google colleagues, family and friends, saying, ``I can't change what I did, but I can't learn from my mistakes. I can do it.'