Who 'Owns' the Google Driverless Car IP?

theodp writes "Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently revealed that he is now leading Google's efforts to ready a driverless car for the consumer market, but one big, publicly-unanswered question is: Who exactly owns the intellectual property behind the highly-touted vehicles? To develop the Google Car, the company said it tapped 'the very best engineers from the DARPA Challenges,' a series of autonomous vehicle races organized by the U.S. government which provided university teams with millions in development funding and millions more in prizes. Last year, Carnegie Mellon reported that 8 of the 15-member Google Car team had current or past ties to DARPA Challenge participants CMU and Stanford. Whether Google's sponsorship of the Stanford Racing Team and CMU Tartan Racing entitled it to the IP is unclear. Clouding matters further is that key Google Car Team members are listed as inventors of autonomous car technology in pending patents assigned to the likes of General Motors and Toyota, and it was reported that the credit (and liability) for another key team member's successful robotic, autonomous Prius project was his-and-his-alone, not Google's. Could another party lay claims to the technology, or does Google have all of its IP ducks in a row on this one?"

Why wouldn't they?

[Baloroth]

If the team members are working for and/ or with Google on the project, Google can use their work on the project. Unless Google is using technology from peoples' work outside the team, there is no way a problem should arise. So, unless someone has proof that Google is in fact using work from people outside the development team or work that the members clearly state falls outside what they are doing for Google, where is there a problem?

For that matter, is this just Slashdot speculation or does one of those links actually point to a TFA (full of speculation)? Because I couldn't find one. Seriously, summaries are summaries. Don't try to turn them into not-quite-full articles themselves please Slashdot.

Also, is this actually a question someone is answering? Again, I skimmed all the links and couldn't find it. Even the last link didn't (seem to) say anything about Levandowski (the unnamed "key" team member) claiming the IP was his-and-his alone (although I may have missed it.)

THAT'S the big question?

[Captain Spam]

Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently revealed that he is now leading Google's efforts to ready a driverless car for the consumer market, but one big, publicly-unanswered question is: Who exactly owns the intellectual property behind the highly-touted vehicles?

In my opinion, it's a sad, sad reflection of our current technological atmosphere that "Who exactly owns the intellectual property behind the highly-touted vehicles?" is the big, publicly-unanswered question, far ahead of, say, "How is it going to work?", "What infrastructure will need to be in place for it to work?", "How much will it cost?", "What sort of services and/or functionality will it supply?", or "What's the underlying technology?", each of which are either vital considerations to the actual functioning of the car or just would be really really interesting and cool to know.

Hell, the fact that it even rates above "What are the legal ramifications of such a device?" or more specifically "How are road laws going to change with these devices on the road?" paints a picture I don't think anyone commissioned.

Re:The other question should who wants own the rig

[Restil]

In the case of an accident, Google would do what most other companies do. Offer a reasonably large settlement offer now to avoid the prospect of a 2 decade long court battle to possibly win more. Besides, chances are good that Google's car will likely cause far fewer accidents than human driven cars would, so they wouldn't need nearly as large of a settlement budget that conventional car companies do. Also, in the case of an accident, there is a huge flood of data available to the engineers to determine the exact cause of the problem and implement a solution to prevent a similar accident from happening in the future. The patch can then be applied to ALL of their vehicles currently on the road without requiring an expensive recall action.

-Restil

Re:The other question should who wants own the rig

[coredog64]

Hate to break it to you, but we're not living out "Fight Club". There are many different alleged "smoking gun" memos, but the one I'm most familiar with is the Ford memo. I won't tell you what you think it said, but I will tell you what it really said: NHTSA allowed that safety improvements that would cost more than $200K per life saved were not cost effective. In 1973, NHTSA wanted to change safety standards to reduce the posibility of a post-rollover fire. Ford then wrote and circulated a memo that showed that the compliance costs for that change were 3x the NHTSA threshold and should be opposed. Now for me, personally, an appropriate regime would be to have the auto manufacturers put a notice on the steering wheel, to be removed by the first owner, that says "We're insured to $X dollars in the event of death due to a design flaw." If that number is too low for you, buy a different car.