The Chinese search giant Baidu is suing former senior vice president Jin Wang for stealing driverless-car tech. Wang led Baidu’s self-driving unit but resigned in March to launch his own driverless firm, Jingchi.
Jingchi successfully completed its first autonomous-vehicle testing on public roads in June, barely two months after the company was founded. According to Technode, Baidu is now claiming that the impressive progress was an ill-gotten gain—the result of Wang’s hanging onto one of Baidu’s computers when he left. That machine may have contained intellectual property the firm is fighting for.
The legal spat may at first glance seem ironic, since as we have reported, one of the goals of Baidu’s self-driving arm, Apollo, is to make the software it develops for autonomus cars freely available.
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