An expert appointed in the wake of the $245 million settlement between Uber Technologies Inc. and Waymo LLC over the use of intellectual property has found that Uber is once again using Waymo’s IP without licensing.

The discovery was disclosed by Uber in its 10-Q regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Uber says that “the independent software expert recently made adverse findings as to certain functions in our autonomous vehicle software. These findings, which are final, will likely result in a license fee or in design changes that could require substantial time and resources to implement and could limit or delay our production of autonomous vehicle technologies.”

In short, Uber will need to hand over significant sums of money to Waymo to license its technology, or Uber will be required to stop using the tech, delaying development of its autonomous vehicle technology.

A spokesperson for Waymo responded to the news by telling Reuters that the findings  “further confirm Waymo’s allegations that Uber misappropriated our software intellectual property. We will continue to take the necessary steps to ensure our confidential information is not being used by Uber.”

The path to this point has been a long one but starts with Anthony Levandowski, a former Google LLC engineer who founded a self-driving truck company called Otto Inc. that was purchased by Uber for $680 million in 2016. Waymo, formerly the Google self-driving car project, claimed that Levandowski stole IP from Waymo and that it was being used by Uber after the acquisition of Otto.

Levandowski was charged with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets from Google in August. If found guilty, Levandowski faces up to 10 years in jail and a maximum fine of $250,000 per count.

The news comes after the publication of an interim report from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board that found that a fatal accident involving an Uber autonomous vehicle in March 2018 was the result of a programming error. At the time of the accident, it was claimed that the Uber vehicle may have not been at fault because the victim walked onto the road, but the NTSB found that Uber’s technology had not been programmed to detect jaywalkers.

Photo: senatormarkwarner/Flickr