Court forcing Uber to fire him, says ex-Waymo exec
A former Waymo executive currently embroiled in a clash between his old company and Uber has claimed that a judge’s order is unlawfully forcing Uber to fire him.
At the centre of this brawl between Uber and Waymo is Anthony Levandowski, who Waymo, which is Google’s former self-driving car division, accused of taking over 14,000 confidential files shortly before resigning and taking them to Uber.
In a filing on Thursday, May 18, Levandowski claimed that a judge had unlawfully forced Uber to fire him if he doesn’t waive his Fifth Amendment rights and attorney-client privileges.
The Fifth Amendment right protects individuals from being compelled to be witnesses in criminal cases against them.
“Anything short of firing Levandowski to get him to waive his Fifth Amendment rights and attorney client privileges would put Uber at risk of contempt, since it would fail to measure up to the court’s command that Uber exercise every lawful power it has over Levandowski,” said Levandowski in the filing.
Earlier in May, District Judge William Alsup, at the US District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, granted a preliminary injunction against Uber, requiring the company to return all of the materials downloaded by the executive to Waymo by May 31.
Levandowski claimed that Uber has now threatened him with termination, unless he relinquishes his Fifth Amendment right.
“When a court orders an employer to do everything in its power to force an employee to speak, cooperate, and discard his Fifth Amendment rights, the threat of termination is not the mere discretionary choice of a private employer,” said the filing.
The executive has asked the court to modify the injunction to make clear the court is not ordering Uber to terminate his employment to “coerce him” to waive his rights.
Waymo recently dropped three of its patent claims in a battle against Uber, US numbers 8,836,922; 9,285,464; and 9,086,273, all of which concern LiDAR (a laser-based scanning and mapping technology).
The self-driving car company said that it would not assert the patents against Uber’s Fuji device.
