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Ex-Google Robocar Engineer Sentenced for Theft

A Google engineer has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for pleading guilty to stealing trade secrets before entering Uber's project to create autonomous vehicles for his ride-hailing service.

The sentence handed down by the U.S. on Tuesday District Judge William Alsup arrived more than four months after longtime Google developer Anthony Levandowski signed a plea deal with the federal prosecutors who brought a criminal complaint against him last August, reports AP.

Levandowski, who helped steer Google's self-driving vehicle effort ahead of Uber 's launch, was also forced to compensate more than $850,000.

Alsup had taken the unusual step of recommending the Justice Department open a criminal investigation into Levandowski while presiding over a high-profile civil trial between Uber and Waymo, a spinoff from a self-driving car project that Google began in 2007 after hiring Levandowski to be part of its team.

Levandowski eventually became disillusioned with Google and left the company in early 2016 to start his own self-driving truck company, called Otto, which Uber eventually bought for $680 million.

Before leaving Google, however, Levandowski downloaded a cache of Google's self-driving vehicle inventions, causing him to face 33 counts of intellectual property theft. He ended up pleaded guilty to one charge, resulting in a hearing on Tuesday.

The accusations turned Levandowski, once highly regarded for his early inroads into self-driving cars, into a notorious figure "almost synonymous with greed run amok in Silicon Valley," his own lawyers acknowledged in court documents filed last week.

The lawyers argued Levandowski deserved some leniency because there was never any evidence that he used Google's trade secrets while overseeing Uber's self-driving car division. He lost that job in 2017 while asserting his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when Uber was still defending itself against Waymo's lawsuit.

Uber resolved his lawsuit with Waymo for $245 million a few days after a court that included his own CEO, Travis Kalanick, thinking about some of his conversations with Levandowski over the ambition of the ride-hailing company to lead the battle to construct self-driving vehicles.

Levandowski, 40, faced a maximum prison sentence of 10 years and a $250,000 fine. Besides sentencing Levandowski to 18 months in prison, Alsup fined him $95,000 and ordered him to pay Waymo $756,499 to reimburse the company for the costs it incurred in helping the government with its investigation.

It seems unclear if Levandowski would be in a position to allow the payments. He applied for bankruptcy earlier this year when another judge upheld an arbitration decision forcing him to pay $179 million to Google, part of which was a payment he got for his self-driving car work.

In its victim statement, Waymo told Alsup that Levandowski's "misconduct was enormously disruptive and harmful to Waymo, constituted a betrayal, and the financial effects would likely have been even more severe had it gone undetected."

Through records claiming that Levandowski deserved jail time, the U.S. Attorney David Anderson found his robbery a "brazen and surprising" crime that appeared to be motivated as much by vanity as by greed.

"Levandowski's actions suggest he wanted to be seen as the singular inventor of the self-driving car, the way Alexander Graham Bell is credited with inventing the telephone," Anderson wrote.

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