Waymo Scales Back Claims Against Uber in Driverless Car Dispute
Judge William Alsup of Federal District Court in San Francisco, who is overseeing the case, urged the company’s lawyers at a hearing on June 7 to drop the patent claims
because “you’re going to lose on all these patent claims unless you pull some rabbit out of a hat.”
Lately, Uber has been trying to distance itself from the actions of Mr. Levandowski,
the former head of Google’s driverless car project who joined Uber last year
By DAISUKE WAKABAYASHIJULY 7, 2017
SAN FRANCISCO — Waymo, the autonomous vehicle business
that operates under Google’s parent company, dropped several patent claims against Uber on Friday, scaling back some of its major allegations in a bitter lawsuit over driverless technology.
Waymo said it agreed to scale back its patent claims because Uber had halted work on a lidar design
that violated Waymo’s patents and is proceeding with a different design.
In a federal court filing, Waymo said it was dropping three of its four claims over Uber violating
its patents related to light detection and ranging sensor technology, or lidar.
“We look forward to trial.”
In a statement, Uber said the dropping of the three claims was “yet another sign” of Waymo overreaching and not delivering on its claims.
Last month, Waymo received a signal from federal court that the patent claims were not its strongest legal argument in the case.