That's what's called a settlement, a.k.a. hush money.
Very, very different from criminal charges.
As noted below Uber settled (that typically means their insurer settled) so there is no need for a civil lawsuit. That is efficiency of the system and how the system is supposed to work. In other words you only bring a suit against the insured if the insurer wrongfully denies your claim, here the insurer paid up, so there is no need for a civil suit by the estate of the deceased against Uber.
The criminal side of things is interesting...but for sake of argument lets say you were in an accident, further assume it was your fault, resulting in a fatality. Typically, unless there was a separate crime (e.g. DUI, drag racing, etc...) there will be no criminal charge, just a civil traffic ticket for the accident (in many jurisdictions there will be a specific charge/penalties for an accident resulting in a fatality, but that will still be a traffic ticket, meaning non-criminal).
I am curious if the "driver" received a traffic ticket for the accident, my guess is he did, I can't imagine the responding officer(s) not issuing a traffic ticket for an accident much less one resulting in a fatality. Interestingly these traffic tickets for accidents with fatalities do usually carry a potential penalties that include suspension of the drivers license, so I do think the law will need to catch up with reality in that regard because suspending the driver's DL doesn't seem to punish the right party in the case of a self-driving car, so perhaps these states that allow self-driving cars need to think about adopting traffic laws specific to self-driving cars and figure out who those tickets should go to and the proper punishment (obviously you can't suspend the DL of a self-driving car or a car company).
Why not? They have to have some kind of license to operate, right? Even if it's not labelled "driver's license". If their vehicles are going around running people over, revoke whatever license it is that they have until they get it fixed.
Why not? This (suspending permission to operate on public roads) seems like a perfectly reasonable response to a self-driving car company being negligent.
The pedestrian ultimately got hit because a lot of fallback systems failed: They disabled the software's ability to emergency-break (1), they disabled the cars' systems to emergency break, and the operator of the vehicle was distracted, not reacting in time.
(1) This was actually done due to false-positives, i.e. the car slamming on the breaks in non-emergency cases. (I find that's a relevant point, because without that detail it just sounds more ludicrous than it already is).
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/14/ieee-analysis-shows-uber-pai...
- Cap table: what % is owed to other founders, investors, employees, etc?
- The total acquisition price may include substantial legal and other fees that will lower the actual amount received by the owners or shareholders.
- How much of the acquisition is financed through cash vs. equity? Equity may vest over a certain time period, and be subject to certain requirements (your sustained performance, ability to clear legal scrutiny, etc.).
- Taxes.
Taking all of this (and probably more) into consideration, it doesn't seem unreasonable for a founder to ultimately net <10% of the total sale price. Again, this is all wild speculation in this particular case.
He may have realized early that Bitcoin is unconfiscatable.
If he has less than $100M in assets, then he will only pay a portion of the judgment. If he, his lawyer and his accountant were smart, he would have moved most of his assets into trust funds, iras and other judgment proof assets. Like Epstein did to protect his wealth from civil lawsuits of the rape victims.
> I would be highly surprised if his employer (Uber) shouldered any of the this
Uber fired him 3 years ago. If they were willing to shoulder the costs, they wouldn't have fired him.
They can confiscate the money/assets, can they stop the barters who of which they've no records?
Can’t stand the TechCrunch Cookie Monster.
Ah, take the text, it's not that long:
---
Anthony Levandowski, the engineer and autonomous vehicle startup founder who was at the center of a trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, has been ordered to pay $179 million to end a contract dispute over his departure from Google.
Reuters was the first to report the court order.
An arbitration panel ruled in December that Levandowski and Lior Ron had engaged in unfair competition and breached their contract with Google when they left the company to start a rival autonomous vehicle company focused on trucking, called Otto. Uber acquired Otto in 2017. A San Francisco County court confirmed Wednesday the panel’s decision.
Ron settled last month with Google for $9.7 million. However, Levandowski, had disputed the ruling. The San Francisco County Superior Court denied his petition today, granting Google’s petition to hold Levandowski to the arbitration agreement under which he was liable.
Levandowski himself may not have to pay the money personally, as this sort of liability may fall to his employer depending on his contract or other legal quirks. However, Levandowski personally filed today for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, stating that the presumptive $179M debt quite exceeds his assets, which he estimates at somewhere between $50M and $100M.
A representative for Levandowski declined comment for this story.
Devin Coldewey contributed to this story.
Could someone with a legal background say what this means in practical terms? Stating you have assets worth "between $50M and $100M" while declaring bankruptcy obviously looks absurd on it's face but I'm guessing there's much more to this?
First, there's zero incentives for him to be precise. If the upper bound is far below his debts, he'll end up with zero regardless of whether he owns 50M or 100M or 150M.
There are incentives for him to be right. Putting incorrect numbers in a legal document is a faux pass at best, and at worse can be assumed to be malicious.
Levandowski may be a jackass but that lawyer is not much better.
So his lawyer is just maintaining the same position that he did in court, otherwise this would be outrageous.
There is a certain amount of disregard for other people who want to make cool stuff too IMO.
Sure, he's not building war weapons or anything like that, but he stole the IP and he made an F* ton of money from it, specifically selling it to competitors. That seems like about the only malicious thing you could do with that IP, if you ask me. Being not malicious would be if it did that for free.
What are the odds that he ends up living kind of normal after this? Like living in the suburbs in a 2500sqft house and commuting to some job that pays $130k? I think close to nil.
Maybe what he did was wrong but I don’t like calling him a “jackass.”
Smart guy.
Waymo confirmed that Uber had paid the $9.7 million owed by Ron, as Uber indemnifies workers under its employment agreements. But Uber had said in financial filings that it expects to challenge paying for Levandowski, who is fighting a federal indictment on charges of stealing trade secrets from Google.
They are technically on the hook for his too but they will definitely try to argue that since an actual crime took place, their indemnity only goes so far. And I'm sure there is some language to that effect in their policies as well.
This has nothing to do with arbitration. Levandowski was sued for IP theft (and faces criminal charges for the same)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal...
"Even the Levandowskis’ nanny assumed a minor role in the drama, when she filed a multimillion-dollar suit of her own, claiming that Anthony had been emotionally abusive to her, and that he had a drawer that was filled with sex toys. (The lawsuit, which offered no evidence of her claims and contained multiple factual errors, was eventually dropped.)"
> However, Levandowski, had disputed the ruling.
The second comma is unneeded. It’s not a comma splice though.
There are some really long sentences with awkward commas, but I believe they’re grammatically correct. It would just be better to break them into multiple sentences.
I’m not an English expert, but I am a native speaker. Although the above sentence is understandable, when you look at it closer the sentence structure is a bit wonky. Anecdotally, I don’t like starting a sentence with “However,”, and this article has that twice. I think it is that kind of style where the author is making a statement and then forcing you to hold it in memory, so to speak, is what the commenter is referring to. It gets mentally taxing to keep track of all of the threads.
But I agree that there is nothing wrong with that sentence.
[1]:https://threatpost.com/equifax-settles-class-action-lawsuit/...
Honestly, I don’t see much difference between this and the oracle java case. Google can’t have it both ways.
I don't remember anything about ML and especially not model parameters. But, yes, I'm somewhat sure those would meet the criteria for copyright.
What's far more interesting is the copyright status of the output of ML models: does it meet the required "creativity" when it's just the product of a computation you set up once, a long time ago? And is the ML model's creator still close enough to the product to be considered its author? If your text generator was trained on Wikipedia data, are the wikipedia authors co-creators? This stuff is going to be fun...
I bet Google and a bunch of other companies are excited about the message this sends to other arrogant engineers who might be considering leaving and building new companies with ideas developed at their prior places of employment. That precedent is worth billions if not trillions.
I bet this will make companies think twice about acquiring startups founded by Google employees.
He literally copied gigabytes of work onto hard drives and stole them.
I don't know what IP is in question, but it seems to me that he had been working in AVs longer than almost anyone in the industry, so it's believable that Uber was valuing the Otto team's accumulated experience, rather than any stolen ideas.
Other co-founders, yes, but Anthony was overall product lead. The article goes into detail.
