Media companies fight to keep Uber v Waymo case public
Several media companies including Bloomberg, BuzzFeed and the Associated Press have opposed a request by Waymo to keep part of the upcoming IP jury trial with Uber a secret.
Waymo filed a brief asking the judge to bar the media and members of the public from parts of the trial to protect its trade secrets.
The company wants exclusions to apply during four types of testimony, according to its proposed order.
These cover exactly how Uber uses Waymo’s trade secrets, Waymo’s non-public financial information, confidential information of Waymo’s employees, and details of mergers and acquisitions.
The US District Court for the Northern District of California invited media companies to submit any objection to the proposal, and a group responded yesterday, October 2.
“Waymo’s motion to close large swaths of the trial rests on a fundamentally incorrect statement of the law,” the document reads.
“Waymo asserts that the courtroom should be closed whenever information it claims to be a trade secret is discussed.
“Because the heart of Waymo’s case is that defendants misappropriated trade secrets, accepting such a broad and undefined claim could result in the closure of a large portion of the trial, and this concomitantly raises Waymo’s burden to justify a limitation of the access right.”
When asked to comment by Gizmodo, an online news website that is part of the coalition, Waymo said it “welcomes a public trial and will work with all parties to minimise closed courtroom time”.
Uber and Waymo have been in a bitter dispute over trade secrets relating to driverless car technology.
WIPR reported in February that Waymo—a self-driving car project that started at Google—claimed that a former Waymo manager, who was recently fired from Uber, had downloaded more than 14,000 highly confidential and proprietary files shortly before resigning and leaving for Uber.
The claim said that this benefitted Otto, which is Uber’s self-driving subsidiary, and allowed Uber to “revive a stalled programme, all at Waymo’s expense”.
Waymo also claimed that Uber infringed its patents concerning its LiDAR technology: US numbers 8,836,922; 9,368,936; and 9,086,273.
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