Topic: Lawsuits
Tesla and Former Employee Settle Lawsuit over Stolen IP, Spin Settlement Differently (Apr 19, 2017)
This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.
Google Details Processes but Not Data in Response to Department of Labor Accusations Over Equal Pay (Apr 11, 2017)
Last week, the Department of Labor accused Google of violating equal pay laws, in the context of an investigation into compliance as a result of Google’s work as a federal contractor. Google pushed back hard against those allegations immediately, but has now released a more detailed statement through its blog. That statement outlines the processes Google has in place to ensure fair pay, through the use of salary setting processes in which analysts calculating compensation packages don’t know the gender of the person for whom they are setting the salary, and other mechanisms to ensure fairness. What Google doesn’t do in this post is say what the current ratio of male to female pay is at the company, or share any other numbers to back up its claims, which is a bit surprising. The DoL claims to have found massive disparities in pay and systemic bias against women, so one would have thought the simplest way to rebut those accusations would be sharing some data, which Google hasn’t done publicly (though presumably feels it has done as part of the investigation). The DoL, meanwhile, continues to seek more data which Google refuses to provide, hence the lawsuit. As I said last week, given the issues over diversity and equal pay in the tech industry generally, it wouldn’t be enormously surprising to find that Google exhibited some of the same problems, but if evidence of significant issues does emerge, it would be more damaging to a company of its size than a smaller one with less of a reputation to maintain. So far, though, neither side is releasing data that would allow independent observers to draw their own conclusions.
via Google
Qualcomm Files Response to Apple Lawsuit (Apr 11, 2017)
Qualcomm has now officially filed a response to Apple’s lawsuit over anticompetitive practices and breach of contract, including both answers to the specific allegations in the suit and a number of counter-claims. One of the main counterclaims is that, by “inducing” regulators to look into Qualcomm, Apple breached the companies’ “Cooperation agreement” and therefore was no longer entitled to certain payments it had received previously. The document further alleges that Apple made many false statements in the course of both its own suit and the discussions it had with regulators, and tried to insert itself into relationships between Qualcomm and other Apple suppliers. Perhaps most interestingly, Qualcomm brings to light something which was covered in the press at the time but didn’t get much attention: the allegation that Apple deliberately hamstrung the Qualcomm chips in the iPhone 7 such that performance would be consistent with those models that had Intel modems, and then prevented Qualcomm from talking about it. On the face of it, that allegation has nothing to do with the broader allegations, but it’s an area where Apple’s public reputation could be vulnerable, and I’m guessing it’s been included in the suit to garner more attention than Qualcomm would get through focusing on the patent and other issues alone.
via Qualcomm (full document here (PDF))
Google accused of ‘extreme’ gender pay discrimination by US labor department – The Guardian (Apr 7, 2017)
The Department of Labor is suing Google over an alleged failure to adequately disclose its compliance with equal opportunity laws as a federal contractor. During the course of the court case, the DoL has accused Google of having a significant gender pay disparity, something Google strongly denies. Were the allegations to be true, it would be extremely damaging for Google’s reputation as an employer, but given that Google hasn’t given the DoL all the documents it’s asking for, you have to ask whether the Department has a full picture of Google’s pay practices. Google, in turn, has argued that the DoL has gone too far in its request for documents and that it has already adequately complied with the applicable regulations. Recent surveys have shown significant gender and race pay disparities within the industry, so it wouldn’t be surprising if those patterns held at Google too, but it claims its own data shows no such disparity. The court case will presumably eventually come down one way or another both on this question and whether Google has adequately complied with regulations, so it’s worth keeping an eye on how this develops.
via The Guardian
The Trump administration no longer wants Twitter to reveal the owner of an anti-Trump account – Recode (Apr 7, 2017)
Just a quick update on yesterday’s item about the USCIS’s fight with Twitter over revealing who was behind an account critical of the administration. It appears the administration has now backed off and so the lawsuit Twitter filed has been ended as well. What I’d love to know is why – whether calmer heads prevailed and someone in the government realized this was a fight it couldn’t win, or something else happened. Either way, what would have been a big test for Twitter and the administration now won’t be.
via Recode
Uber responds to Google lawsuit over self-driving cars – Business Insider (Apr 7, 2017)
We finally have a fleshed-out response from Uber to the Waymo lawsuit over stealing of LIDAR technology, and it doesn’t do much more than muddy the water over this issue. The biggest sticking point here is that Anthony Levandowski, who is alleged to have stolen files from Waymo before he left and used these to develop LIDAR technology at Otto and then Uber, refuses to cooperate with the investigation, and Uber refuses to compel him as an employee to cough up the files. Uber also argues that its LIDAR design is different in key respects from Waymo’s and therefore that it clearly hasn’t been copied from it. The judge seems to be highly skeptical of Uber’s claimed inability to do anything with regard to the Levandowski files, and seems minded to grant at least a temporary injunction against Uber’s LIDAR technology. Uber’s claims that such an injunction would significantly harm its business seem like nonsense – this technology has nothing to do with its core business today and is merely being tested in a few cities. A longer-term injunction would obviously be more damaging because it would stop Uber from advancing the technology, but in and of itself that’s not a valid argument against such an injunction should the judge determine that the design was copied. Lots more to come on this, no doubt.
via Business Insider
Twitter is suing the government for trying to unmask an anti-Trump account – Recode (Apr 6, 2017)
A new front has just opened up in the war between the Trump administration and the tech industry: Twitter is suing the government after it attempted to compel Twitter to reveal the identity of the people behind the @Alt_USCIS Twitter account. That account is allegedly maintained by employees of the US Citizenship and Immigration Service and has been highly critical of the Trump administration and its policies on immigration. In and of itself, that seems like no legal justification at all for unmasking the account’s owners, and that’s why Twitter is pushing back on free speech grounds. But the legal hook here may be that the account is using the name of the agency in its Twitter handle, and as such might just possibly be in contravention of trademark or copyright law, or anti-impersonation regulations. Regardless of the reasoning, this sets up yet another fight between the tech industry and the administration, though in fairness Twitter had resisted some earlier attempts by the Obama administration to get at the people behind accounts as well. It’s also an important test of one of the key tenets of Twitter’s value proposition as a free speech platform.
via Recode
Australian regulator sues Apple alleging iPhone ‘bricking’ – Reuters (Apr 6, 2017)
This piece is sadly short on details and on comment from Apple, so we have to read between the lines a little bit to see what’s happening here. My guess is that this lawsuit from the Australian competition commission concerns Apple’s practice of disabling phones which have had their screens tampered with when that process involves the Touch ID sensor and its associated secure enclave. Apple does this in order to preserve the security of that system, but to an end user or repair shop it just looks like Apple is trying to keep the repair business to itself. Some US states have been pushing right-to-repair laws to deal with this kind of situation, and Apple has been pushing back, arguing that there are security issues at stake. The problem is that Apple often charges a lot more for either AppleCare or the repair itself than third parties, so the optics are bad even if the reasoning is sound. I suspect Apple is going to be dealing with a lot more of this kind of thing, and this Australian case will be an important test of how effectively Apple is able to fight its corner.
via Reuters
Uber says trade theft case is between Otto chief and Google – USA Today (Mar 16, 2017)
This feels like something of a slime ball move on Uber’s part on two fronts: firstly, trying to move the court case with Waymo out of open court and behind closed doors; and secondly, essentially trying to push the case off its back and onto Levandowski’s. I had said previously that the course was going to be fascinating for the details it would provide about how Uber developed technologies and how it would defend against what look like fairly solid allegations, but if it gets its wish here we won’t get to see any of that. But I think it’s the attempt to make this a case about an employee rather than the company that seems particularly sleazy – if the allegations are indeed true, then Uber and not Levandowski benefited the most, and making this seem like a dispute between an employee and former employer feels like a total misrepresentation.
via USA Today
Apple Joins Group of Companies Supporting Google in Foreign Email Privacy Case – Mac Rumors (Mar 14, 2017)
Given the way other big tech companies had weighed in on the related Microsoft case over the past few years, it was a little odd that more hadn’t sprung to Google’s defense in this one, but it’s good to see that they are now doing so. These cases have far-reaching consequences not just for user privacy but for the ability of US companies to do business in overseas markets, and those companies need to defend themselves vigorously. The final outcome of both cases is therefore worth watching closely.
via Mac Rumors
Alphabet’s Waymo filed an injunction against Uber for allegedly stealing intellectual property – Recode (Mar 10, 2017)
The fact that Waymo is suing Uber isn’t new, but this new step of filing for an injunction is, and that’s important because it could speed things up considerably. Judging the case in full could have taken months if not years, but a request for an injunction will involve convincing a judge in a much shorter space of time that there’s enough merit to the case for him or her to intervene in the near term. So we’ll know rather sooner how solid Waymo’s case here is, and will likely also get additional details from both sides about exactly what’s been going on. Importantly, we’ll get more from Uber than its brief initial statement about the accusations being baseless, which will be intriguing because from where I sit the forensic evidence looks fairly compelling. As I’ve said before, though, the toughest aspect of this for Waymo and its lawyers is proving that Levandowski actually used the files he downloaded rather than simply his memories of work he’d previously done.
via Recode
Apple’s U.K. Suit Against Qualcomm Adds to Global Patent War – Bloomberg (Mar 4, 2017)
Just a quickie here – Apple has now sued Qualcomm in the UK too, on top of its existing suits in China and the US. There’s not a lot more detail in this article or, apparently, in the court filing itself, but the thrust of the UK case seems to be the same as in the other cases already filed.
via Bloomberg
Uber’s self-driving unit quietly bought firm with tech at heart of Alphabet lawsuit – Reuters (Mar 1, 2017)
This is an interesting angle on the Uber-Waymo lawsuit over the alleged stealing of LiDAR technology by Anthony Levandowski – it appears Levandowski’s Otto acquired a company which specialized in LiDAR technology before it was itself acquired by Uber, providing an alternative theory for how the company was apparently able to get up to speed so quickly on the technology. One of Waymo’s key arguments in its suit was that Levandowski appeared to make unreasonably rapid progress on LiDAR following Otto’s founding, and that the only explanation was theft of ideas, designs and so on from Waymo. As an interesting side note, see also this newly-released October 2016 interview with Anthony Levandowski from Forbes, in which he somewhat bizarrely volunteers the information that he didn’t steal any IP from Google when he left. He also talks through his long history with autonomous driving technology, which raises a key point here: clearly Levandowski learned a lot about this technology over the years, and taking that knowledge with him to a new employer clearly isn’t stealing. So how does Waymo prove in court that Otto/Uber used the documents he allegedly downloaded rather than his personal knowledge (or technology from somewhere completely different) in designing LiDAR systems? If you know the best way to build a LiDAR system because you’ve done it before, are you obligated to act as if you have no idea how to do it when you move to a new employer? I’m not a lawyer, but I think some of these questions are fascinating, and are likely to be critical in this case.
via Reuters
Apple, tech leaders will side with transgender youth in upcoming Supreme Court case – Axios (Feb 24, 2017)
This is a nice scoop for Ina Fried, who just moved from Recode to Axios. But more importantly, the news itself is a significant escalation of the comments several tech companies made this week about the Trump administration’s policy on transgender students and bathrooms in schools. This would now be the second time in as many months that several major tech companies find themselves on the opposite side of a high profile legal case from the new administration. What a massive turnaround from those first weeks after the election, when tech companies seemed afraid to say anything negative about the new US government.
via Axios
Waymo Sues Uber over Stealing of Confidential Information (Feb 23, 2017)
Alphabet autonomous driving subsidiary Waymo is suing Uber and its Otto subsidiary over alleged stealing of confidential information by Anthony Levandowski, who was one of the early executives at Waymo and subsequently left abruptly in early 2016 and immediately unveiled a self-driving truck company, Otto. That company, in turn, was acquired just a few months later by Uber. Waymo has done some fairly detailed investigate work that’s outlined in the complaint, and discovered that six weeks before Levandowski’s resignation, he downloaded lots of files from Waymo’s servers, and it argues that these in turn informed Otto’s (now Uber’s) LiDAR designs. As this blog post from Waymo says, fierce competition in autonomous driving technology is a good thing – it’s pushing the market forward rapidly and leading to some great innovations that should benefit consumers. But there are obviously lines companies shouldn’t cross as they compete, and this would be one of those, if it’s proven to be true. This is the second lawsuit in recent weeks involving employees moving between autonomous driving companies – the first involved Tesla and a startup. In both cases, the allegation is in part about stealing proprietary information. Given that Uber is already dealing with the fallout from a sexual harassment and discrimination blowup in the past week and still reeling from the #deleteUber campaign, this is terrible timing, but may also be a sign that the company’s aggressive stance on competition is hurting it in more ways than one.
via Waymo (full complaint here)
Apple files 14-point appeal against European Commission’s $14 billion tax edict – AppleInsider (Feb 21, 2017)
Long story short: Apple has filed its formal appeal of the EU’s action against Ireland regarding Apple’s tax treatment in the country, and it argues for the dismissal of all charges on the basis of a number of different points. That’s not surprising – Apple immediately after the ruling said it would appeal, so this is just that process rolling along. I’ve never been a huge fan of the ruling – it felt like judicial overreach and part of the ongoing spat between the EU and US on taxes and on competition between US and European tech companies rather than something based on actual legal merit. Nevertheless, as I admitted at the time, neither I nor the vast majority of other tech industry commentators are actually experts in EU tax law, and even admitted experts like the Irish authorities, Apple’s accountants and lawyers, and the European Commission’s investigators can actually agree on what the right answer is. We can state opinions all we want, but they don’t actually matter – this case will go to court and at some point a conclusion will be reached which all the parties will have to live with. A move to enable lower-tax repatriation in the US would certainly go some way to bolstering Apple’s case that it already pays adequate taxes in its home market on what it earns in Europe, but Apple has no direct control over that outcome either.
via AppleInsider (Apple’s filing here and some fairly Euro-skeptic analysis by Florian Mueller here)
Thirty Additional Companies Join Tech Amicus Brief on Immigration Ban – USA Today (Feb 7, 2017)
This is really just an addendum to yesterday’s item about the amicus brief filed by (then) 97 tech companies, as some 30 additional companies added their names to the brief yesterday afternoon. Among them were some of the Elon Musk-controlled holdouts from the initial set, Tesla and SpaceX as well as a number of smaller companies which simply don’t seem to have been looped in to the initial effort. The remaining holdouts are increasingly conspicuous by their absence, though it remains more consumer- than enterprise-focused as a group (HP did sign on later in the day, but IBM, Oracle, and other enterprise heavyweights are still missing), and the telecoms carriers and cable companies are all missing as a group too.
via TechCrunch
Vizio to Pay Fines Over Unlawful Tracking and Selling of User Data (Feb 7, 2017)
It turns out Vizio has been collecting extremely granular data on users of its smart TVs, and then matching its IP data with offline data about individuals and households (essentially everything short of actual names). And it’s done all this without making users properly aware that this was what it was doing. The data related to everything consumers watched on the TVs, whether the content came through Vizio’s own smart TV apps or merely through one of its inputs from another box or antenna. Something I’d forgotten was that Vizio filed an S-1 in preparation to go public back in 2015 – it never actually went public because Chinese player LeEco decided to acquire them (a deal due to close shortly). Aside from talking about how many TVs the company sells, the S-1 makes a big deal of of the “up to 100 billion viewing data points daily” it collects from 8 million TVs, and touts its InScape data services, which package up this data for advertisers, although it says this data is “anonymized”, which feels like an alternative fact at this point. The risk factors in the filing even mention possible regulatory threats to such data gathering, so it’s probably fair to say that Vizio shared more information with its potential investors about the data it was collecting than it did with end users. To settle the case, Vizio has to pay a total of $3.7m in fines to the FTC and the state of New Jersey (whose AG brought the suit with the FTC), discontinue the practice, and disclose it to consumers. I can’t wait to see how it manages that last point – imagine turning on your Vizio TV one day and seeing a message pop up about the fact that it’s been tracking your every pixel for the last several years. Assuming that’s done right, it could be the most damaging part of it this for Vizio, which made over $3 billion in revenue in its most recently reported financial years. Meanwhile, yet another headache for LeEco to manage.
97 companies file opposition to Trump’s immigration order – TechCrunch (Feb 6, 2017)
Last week, Recode reported that several big tech companies were drafting a letter to the Trump administration on immigration, though I still can’t find confirmation that this letter has actually been sent. However, those tech companies and many others have now filed an official friend of the court brief in the lawsuit being brought against the administration by the states of Minnesota and Washington. This steps things up a notch, formally putting the 97 companies behind the brief on the other side of a court case from the administration. As with the early condemnations of the executive orders just over a week ago, Amazon is notable by its absence, as is Tesla (whose CEO Elon Musk has continued to sit on the advisory council Uber CEO Travis Kalanick vacated last week). Tesla’s absence is consistent with Musk’s overall stated strategy of trying to bring change from within, but Amazon’s absence may simply be due to the fact that it weighed in on the case separately earlier in the process (though Microsoft has participated at both stages).
Update: this tweet explains that Amazon was asked not to sign the amicus brief because it was a witness in the original case.
via TechCrunch (more coverage on Techmeme)
Court Rules Google Has to Hand Over Data in Contradiction to Recent Microsoft Ruling – The Register (Feb 4, 2017)
The recent ruling in the ongoing case involving Microsoft and customer data stored outside the US had at least temporarily provided some reassurance that the big tech companies’ stance on this issue would be upheld in court. However, a new court in a different part of the US has now ruled the other way, though its rationale for ruling differently is that Google manages its data and data centers differently from Microsoft. This is a blow to the big tech companies who’ve fought to keep their overseas data centers (and the data held there on non-US customers) off limits for US law enforcement, but the Microsoft case was likely to go to the Supreme Court anyway. Hopefully, the court will rule in such a way that provides clarity not just in the Microsoft case but more broadly on this question.
via Register