Waymo Scales Back Claims Against Uber in Driverless Car Dispute<br />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<br />because “you’re going to lose on all these patent claims unless you pull some rabbit out of a hat.”<br />Lately, Uber has been trying to distance itself from the actions of Mr. Levandowski,<br />the former head of Google’s driverless car project who joined Uber last year<br />By DAISUKE WAKABAYASHIJULY 7, 2017<br />SAN FRANCISCO — Waymo, the autonomous vehicle business<br />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.<br />Waymo said it agreed to scale back its patent claims because Uber had halted work on a lidar design<br />that violated Waymo’s patents and is proceeding with a different design.<br />In a federal court filing, Waymo said it was dropping three of its four claims over Uber violating<br />its patents related to light detection and ranging sensor technology, or lidar.<br />“We look forward to trial.”<br />In a statement, Uber said the dropping of the three claims was “yet another sign” of Waymo overreaching and not delivering on its claims.<br />Last month, Waymo received a signal from federal court that the patent claims were not its strongest legal argument in the case.
