We’ve previously encountered Arthur Firstenberg of Santa Fe, N.M., and his anti-wi-fi litigation. Now the self-reported sufferer from electromagnetic sensitivity “is suing his next-door neighbor for refusing to turn off her cell phone and other electronic devices,” saying his efforts to avoid the fields threatens to render him homeless. He also thinks neighbor Raphaela Monribot should pay him $530,000. He’s represented by lawyer Lindsay Lovejoy Jr. [Santa Fe New Mexican, The Register, DSL Reports]
More: alt-paper SFreeper (which seems to have been on the story first) reports that attorney Lovejoy “is a graduate of Harvard and Yale, as well as a former Assistant New Mexico Assistant Attorney General who has argued cases alongside now-US Sen. Tom Udall, D-NM.” (via Chris Fountain)
Tagged as:
cellphones,
New Mexico,
technology
It’s not too early to begin thinking out the liability implications of robotics. [WSJ Law Blog]
Tagged as:
technology
A California federal court granted summary judgment to Hewlett-Packard against a plaintiff who “brought a putative class action against HP because its laser jet printers shut down printer operations before the toner cartridges are really empty. … The User Manual did not disclose that toner would remain in the cartridges when they reached ‘empty,’ but rather advised that the cartridges would yield up to 2,000 color pages.” [Russell Jackson; Baggett v. Hewlett-Packard, PDF]
Tagged as:
class actions,
technology
Reader A.V. writes:
Dear Overlawyered,
I’ve won the class action lottery!
According to the e-mail I received today from Symantec (I’ve been a long-time user of their Norton computer security products), my prize is either: (1) a $15.00 voucher redeemable for the online purchase of any Symantec products; or (2) a cash payment of $2.50. Plaintiffs’ class counsel? Oh, they get “an amount not to exceed $2,275,000.00.”
I know you’ll be pleased for me.
There’s a settlement website in Heverly/Margolis v. Symantec Corp. with further details. Other readers have written in to say they got similar notices. And this morning I too got a notice, so apparently I’m a class member as well. The lawyers who’ve been representing us all this time without our realizing are Green & Pagano of New Brunswick, N.J., Kantrowitz Goldhamer & Graifman of Chestnut Ridge, N.Y., Chavez & Gertler LLP of Mill Valley, Calif., Smolow & Landis of Trevose, Pa., and Kendrick & Nutley of Pasadena, Calif.
More: “Can’t we do better than this?” Jeff Sovern weighs in at Consumer Law & Policy.
Tagged as:
class action settlements,
technology
- Litigation over high-tech products is rife, but major benefits for consumers can be hard to discern [Low End Mac]
- “United settles with female ex-pilot who found p0rn in cockpits” [Obscure Store]
- California suit charges negligent “laying on of hands” at church service [Lowering the Bar]
- UN resolution against “defamation of religion” imperils free speech [Paula Schriefer, Freedom House/CSM, Steyn/NR "Corner", National Secular Society (U.K.), Ilya Somin @ Volokh
- DivorceNetwork.com, social networking for those caught up in family law battles? [Ambrogi, Legal BlogWatch]
- Prosecutors behaving badly in Wayne County (Mich.), Miami, Santa Clara County [Radley Balko, Reason "Hit and Run"]
- After nine years, the notorious Bill Lerach California-unfair-competition-law suit against Kwikset (over several screws from Taiwan in a lock marked “Made in America”) finally winds down [California Civil Justice, earlier]
- Oklahoma AG Drew Edmondson to poultry companies: my pals will bankrupt you with massive verdicts unless you settle [Rizo/Legal NewsLine; more]
Tagged as:
agriculture and farming,
attorneys general,
aviation,
Bill Lerach,
California,
churches,
divorce,
family law,
free speech,
hostile environment,
Oklahoma,
s. 17200,
social networking,
technology
An experimental feature on the popular electronic book will allow a little voice to auto-read the text of the book for you, but the Author’s Guild says that infringes on its members’ rights to the audio adaptations of their works. [WSJ, Slashdot]
Tagged as:
copyright,
technology
France’s counterpart to RIAA has been given a green light to sue four U.S. companies that develop peer-to-peer file-sharing applications. The applications make possible both lawful and unlawful methods of sharing copyrighted or uncopyrighted material. (”Record Labels to Sue Vuze, Limewire and SourceForge”, TorrentFreak, Nov. 14).
Tagged as:
France,
RIAA and file sharing,
technology
Bankrupt SCO Group Inc., much loathed for its (sometimes successful) efforts to extract copyright royalties from users of the open-source Linux system, has suffered another humiliating defeat in a Utah federal courtroom. The court proceedings determined, among other things, that SCO didn’t in fact own the copyrights it claimed to own, and had breached its fiduciary duty under an earlier agreement with Novell. (Ars Technica, Information Week, GrokLaw). At the height of SCO’s notoriety, the high-profile law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner was pursuing its anti-Linux claims on contingency. Earlier here, here, and here. [Update Sept. 18, 2009: in dramatic reversal, 10th Circuit, McConnell writing, reinstates SCO's suit; Boies firm still representing SCO. See WSJ Law Blog, 8/25/09]
In other news, progress is being made on a scheme of “defense patent aggregation”; an outfit called the RPX Corp., with subscriptions from large technology-using companies, aims to buy up (presumably lower-value) patents to keep them out of the hands of trolls (WSJ Law Blog).
Tagged as:
copyright,
David Boies,
patent trolls,
technology
A judge had overturned the conviction of the former Norwich, Ct. substitute teacher (Jul. 15, Mar. 14 and Jun. 10, 2007, etc.) over the episode in which her computer (almost certainly infected with unwanted malware) displayed a stream of dirty popup windows while her students were watching. To the amazement of many, prosecutors refused to drop the charges and moved to hold a second trial. Now Amero has agreed to resolve the episode by pleading down to a single misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct, as opposed to the 40 years she could have gotten on the original charges. (Rick Green, “Misdemeanor Plea Ends Norwich P0rnography Case”, Hartford Courant, Nov. 22).
More: “What I’d like to see come of it is a computer forensics innocence project.” (Joe Windish, The Moderate Voice; see also Balko/Reason “Hit and Run”, Bill Jempty @ WizBang, Rick Green @ Courant followup).
Tagged as:
child protection,
Connecticut,
crime and punishment,
technology
Alex Harris thinks a proper understanding of contract law would not call on buyers to go to the expense of shipping back a product if it arrived saddled with unexpected and unwelcome contract terms. But the problem seems to be going away, he says, in that that tech goods are increasingly sold in such a way as to give buyers a chance to examine the contract terms before taking possession of the product. (Technology Liberation Front, Oct. 28).
Tagged as:
contracts of adhesion,
technology
On October 1 a new law went into effect in Nevada requiring businesses to encrypt all “personal identifying information” (things like Social Security and drivers’ license numbers and credit card numbers) of customers in email and “electronic transmissions” more generally. The law has raised concern among, e.g., law offices and medical providers which often work with client documents containing such numbers; it will now be unlawful (say) to email such documents from a professional’s workplace to his or her home office absent encryption. Howard Marks at Information Week (Oct. 13):
Electronic transmission isn’t defined, so one interpretation would include the telephone — so if you forget the password to your online banking account, your bank will have to snail mail or fax you a new one. It does say “to a person outside of the secure system of the business,” so you don’t have to run out and encrypt all your disks like the vendor that brought this to my attention would like.
Don Sears at Baseline (Sept. 19) cites a Las Vegas lawyer on such problems with the law as “the lack of coordination with industry standards and the unclear nature of penalties both criminal and civil” and concludes “once again, the legal system and the IT industry are faced with potentially bigger compliance and liability issues than they probably intended.” At Davis Wright Tremaine’s Privacy and Security Law Blog (Feb. 27), Randy Gainer cites similar (but not identical) mandates moving forward in other states and also notes, “the overwhelming majority of reports of stolen and lost consumer data relate to stored data, not data in transit…. The limited, data-in-transit, encryption mandate in the Nevada statute will therefore do little to stem the tide of stolen and lost consumer data.” Marian Waldmann at Morrison & Foerster (Oct. 2007) notes California’s more sweeping but less specific mandate for businesses to implement and maintain “reasonable security procedures and practices”, and also points out that the determination of whether an out-of-state entity dealing with Nevada residents is “doing business” in the state, and therefore subject to legal mandates of this sort, has been described by the Nevada Supreme Court itself as “often a laborious, fact-intensive inquiry resolved on a case-by-case basis” in litigation. Other commentary: Sidley Austin, Lori MacVittie/DevCentral.
Tagged as:
California,
Nevada,
privacy,
technology
There’s a good chance you’ve heard numbers like those bandied about. How reliable are they? (Julian Sanchez, “A 20-year game of Telephone”, Ars Technica, Oct. 7).
Tagged as:
technology
“In the war on piracy, consumer privacy is often the first casualty. But on Monday, a federal court imposed some limits on the collateral damage content owners can inflict, blocking a satellite TV provider’s effort to subpoena the names and personal information of thousands of people who purchased ‘free-to-air’ satellite receivers that can be hacked to decrypt signals meant for paid subscribers.” A brief from EFF had argued that “Echostar’s [parent company of Dish Network's] subpoenas were ‘especially troubling in light of past litigation’ where another satellite TV provider, DirecTV, had similarly obtained customer information in the course of a civil suit against a device manufacturer. The company then sent out 170,000 letters pressuring customers to agree to a $3,500 ’settlement’ or face litigation.” (Julian Sanchez, Ars Technica, Oct. 1). On the earlier DirecTV litigation campaign, see posts here, here, here, and (reader letter) here.
Tagged as:
copyright,
discovery,
lawyering vs. privacy,
technology
