Question: Discuss Google's (Waymo) recent lawsuit (filed a couple of days ago) against Uber, filed in a San Francisco federal district court, alleging, among other things, intellectual property theft of technologies involving autonomous driving automobile technology and other claims.
Please discuss the following:
1. What are the basic allegations?
2. What is Uber's response?
3. What ethical dilemmas are concerned here?
4. If technology firms (such as Google) are aggressive in suing former employees for theft and intellectual property claims, will this affect its ability to recruit talented engineers? Explain.
5. If technology firms (such as Google) are not aggressive in suing former employees for theft and intellectual property claims, will this affect its reputation to stave off these type of thefts as a reputation for "going after people" for theft might actually protect your company from these heists as employees believe that it is not worth it? Explain.
6. Does this issue sharpen the need for company policies to avoid these problems? How?
7. Provide any other thoughts or issues that you see from our studies in this course that this dispute reveals?