Uber files motion to move Waymo lawsuit into arbitration

Mobility giant wants to keep parts of Waymo\'s I.P. suit out of public court.

Uber filed a motion in a San Francisco court Monday to request that parts of Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Waymo's intellectual property theft suit against the mobility giant be handled in arbitration rather than in open court.

In effect, Uber's lawyers are arguing that Waymo is accusing its employees of theft, citing as grounds the fact that its "[...] employment agreements contain very broad arbitration provisions," Automotive News reports.

However, Waymo did not name the individuals in the suit. It named only Uber and the now-defunct autonomous truck developer Otto (which was purchased by the former). Uber's lawyers have argued that this was done deliberately to circumvent arbitration.

This is merely the latest in a series of recent developments in the brewing Silicon Valley legal drama.

Earlier in March, Daniel Compton, a self-described "independent software consultant" based in Morrinsville, New Zealand, theorized that Waymo is planning to reveal the presence of a deliberate conspiracy between former Waymo employees (lead by engineer Anthony Levandowski) and an executive at Uber to steal Waymo's I.P. and disguise that theft as the work of a startup that would then be acquired by Uber.

If that is true, it would be added incentive for Uber to keep as much of the suit as possible out of the public eye.