Uber Self-Driving Case: Google's Waymo May Not Need a Smoking Gun

On the face of it, Uber has had a terrible week in its legal brawl with Waymo, Google parent company Alphabet's self-driving car effort. First it suffered the public reveal of a long-awaited report that appeared to confirm Uber knew its former superstar engineer, Anthony Levandowski, took intellectual property from Google, his former employer, before it hired him. Then, over Uber's protest, the judge pushed the trial date back from this month to December, giving Waymo more time to prepare its case. To quickly sum up the case: Waymo alleges that when former star engineer Levandowski left the company in January 2016, he made off with thousands of documents containing its proprietary information, then used that intellectual property to jumpstart his own company, Otto. Uber acquired Otto for a reported $680 million in August 2016, and Waymo says Levandowski brought this stolen info with him--and that its intellectual property ended up in Uber's self-driving cars.