Uber and Waymo Settle Trade Secrets Suit Over Driverless Cars - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/technology/uber-waymo-lawsuit-driverless.html
Entre riches et puissants, il y a toujours un moyen de s’arranger. C’est un des problèmes des brevets : ils organisent la concurrence/coopération entre gros portefeuilles de brevets, mais marginalisent les acteurs de moindre importance. De même, les salaires astronomiques renforcent la concentration des compétences chez quelques géants aux appétits voraces.
SAN FRANCISCO — Waymo and Uber settled their legal fight on Friday, nearly a year after Waymo first accused the ride-hailing company of plotting to steal important self-driving car technology.
After four days of arguments and testimony in Federal District Court here, Uber agreed to provide Waymo, the self-driving car unit under Google’s parent company, Alphabet, with 0.34 percent of its stock. According to Waymo, the settlement’s terms value Uber at $72 billion, meaning the Alphabet unit’s stake is worth about $245 million.
The settlement closes a legal fight that riveted Silicon Valley. It pitted the most successful company from the dot-com era against this generation’s biggest start-up in a fight over autonomous vehicles — a potentially trillion-dollar industry that is expected to transform transportation.
The trial also offered a peek into how Silicon Valley really works: the rise of promising start-ups that challenge incumbents; the inner workings of rich, but often chaotic, technology companies; the complicated rivalries among billionaire tech entrepreneurs; and the costly competition for engineering talent.