Title feels a little clickbaity, as it was a request from the Judge prior to going to a Jury:
U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco has asked
Waymo to narrow its more than 100 trade secrets claims to
fewer than 10 to put in front of a jury.
"Waymo’s retreat on three of their four patent claims is yet another sign
that they have overpromised and can’t deliver," Uber said in a statement.
"Not only have they uncovered zero evidence of any of the 14,000 files in
question coming to Uber, they now admit that Uber’s LiDAR design is
actually very different than theirs. Faced with this hard truth, Waymo has
resorted to floating conspiracy theories not rooted in fact, doing
everything they can to put the focus on sensation rather than substance."
I might have agreed that this type of rhetoric does a poor job at influencing about a year ago. Unfortunately, as this past US presidential election has show, it seems to be pretty effective.
"It" are allegations and statements that very liberally interpret convenient facts, ignore inconvenient facts and inject conjecture to support the narrative they want the public to believe. I'm shocked that anyone would think lawyers for only one side would do that. It's all heresay, allegations, conjecture and bullshit by lawyers all sides until evidence is presented in a court of law and a judgement has been made. And even then the judgement may be wrong for all sorts of reasons.
FWIW, Recode is one of the few places covering the case fairly equitably (probably because it's run by one of the few journalists in Silicon Valley with any scruples and minimal conflicts of interest, Kara Swisher).
I'm surprised to hear Kara Swisher described like that. I feel like most of her writing is near tabloid gossip quality, and she seems to have an unhealthy obsession with trashing Yahoo/Marissa Mayer. I did work there for a while, so I'm certainly biased, but I've never seen a journalist so intent on badmouthing a single company/CEO with such wild speculation and over-dramatized commentary. She did seem to have a good source so maybe she was milking that but it went way beyond reporting the facts.
She's certainly not perfect. She obviously has her own biases, but they seem more personal and certainly aren't blatant conflicts of interest like most of the other tech journalists that have taken money from VCs do. Many of the others do not bite the hands that feed them. They make sure to cover investments of their investors positively and competitors of the investments of their investors negatively. It's all so horribly incestuous.
Kara Swisher's main career was been publishing leaked Silicon Valley documents (including Google's) while being married to a Google Vice President. (They are now separated and the VP is no longer at Google)
I think it's because you know significantly more about the legal battle than the average person. Now, a jury may not be convinced by this stunt, that I'll give.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco has asked
Waymo to narrow its more than 100 trade secrets claims to
fewer than 10 to put in front of a jury.
My understanding is that there are two parts to this suit: patent infringement and trade secrets. You can't patent a trade secret (then it wouldn't be secret), so these are two independent things.
Alsup was suggesting Waymo to drop the patent portion of their suit and focus solely on the trade secret portion of their case. The trade secrets were pared down as mentioned in that snippet, but that's in addition to dropping 3 of the 4 patent infringement claims.
totally. My first thoughts while reading the title was "oh now that's a 90 degree turn, patents are bogus". Turn out the title is... oh well, this is kind of a fake news, it's everywhere, even on HN. What a wonderful world
Note that the reason he told them to drop the trade secret claims is because they're kind of ridiculous:
> the judge scolded Waymo for being "overbroad" in what it says are 121 trade secrets involved in the case. For example, Alsup wrote that Waymo can't claim that the way it positions light sources in its Lidar is protected, since the design uses well-known principles of physics.
