Days ago, engineer Anthony Levandowski was indicted on criminal charges accusing him of stealing information from Google-owned Waymo and taking it to Uber. While the indictment alleges he downloaded 14,000 documents containing trade secrets before he left Google, Levandowski insists the downloads were his. An arbitration panel ordered Levandowski to pay Google $127 million. After firing Levandowski – who repeatedly asserted his constitutional right against self-incrimination before the trial – his new employer, Uber, paid $245 million to settle its own civil lawsuit with Google. The sitting federal judge recommended a criminal probe into a possible theft – now an indictment. Everybody does it, right? Who pays the $372 million? Does Uber have to protect Levandowski? Can Levandowski claim ownership of his ideas? Can Levandowski go to jail?
Continue Reading Who Pays When Your New Employee Brings Your Competitor’s Trade Secrets?
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Protecting Your Piece of the Pie: Texas Adopts the Uniform Trade Secrets Act
By Jamie Ribman on
Pizza the Action is a major distributor of pizza dough and toppings and provides these products to many large national pizza chains. Pizza the Action’s top sales person, Eaton Wright, just announced that he was resigning and that he had accepted a position with The Pie’s the Limit, an upstart competitor in the very same…