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Florida Citizens' Anti-trust Payout Dwarfed By Lawyers'
According to Robin "Roblimo" Miller's article on NewsForge, Florida residents are receiving word by electronic and postal mail about the likely outcome of that state's class action suit against Microsoft (last mentioned on Slashdot last September): the upshot is that Florida residents who purchased a Microsoft operating system or Microsoft Office would be eligible for a settlement payment (in vouchers) of $5-12; the lawyers involved are seeking $48 million in fees. The settlement terms have several interesting clauses; for instance, by accepting, you would be agreeing to "settle and release all claims, demands, actions, suits, and causes of action against Microsoft and/or its directors, officers, employees, attorneys, insurers or agents, whether known or unknown, asserted or unasserted, that any member of the Florida Settlement Class ever had, could have had, now has or hereafter can, shall or may have, relating in any way to ... any conduct, act or omission that was or could have been alleged in this case as the basis for any antitrust or unfair competition claims."
is it really worth signing your rights away for a measely $12?
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Class Members will be eligible to receive a total maximum amount of $202 million in vouchers, worth $5 for each license for Microsoft MS-DOS, Windows versions 1.0 to 3.2, Windows NT Workstation, Windows 2000 Professional, Word, Excel and Office software, and $12 for each license for Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Millennium Edition that Class Members indirectly acquired in the United States between November 16, 1996 and December 31, 2002 for use in Florida
Isn't this just yet another slap on the wrist for microsoft. It just makes them use their ill gotten gains from the monopoly, which probably has earned them quite a bit in interest anyway. I have a feeling this is a bit like the previous case, give them some punishment which "looks" big but doesnt actually have any affect on them.
In theory, the idea is not to enrich the individual plaintiffs, but to make the aggregate penalty high enough to get the company's notice.
In practice, it's rarely so simple, since for a company Microsoft's size, $202 Million (which sounds like "a lot" of money to any sane person) can not only be easily written off in any year's books, but probably doesn't even amount to the aggregate interest they earned on the licensing of the products in question.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Too many lawyer jokes can be inserted here.
Omnis amans amens
One way to stop these predatory lawsuits is to require that the lawyers get paid in coupons when the class members settlement is in coupons.
6 a
See http://overlawyered.com/archives/01/mar2.html#031
The settlement terms have several interesting clauses; for instance, by accepting, you would be agreeing to "settle and release all claims, demands, actions, suits, and causes of action against Microsoft and/or its directors, officers, employees, attorneys, insurers or [snip...]
how is that interesting? that's what a settlement IS--they give you something and you release them from any further liability. This whole reading-comic-books-between-the-lines editorializing is really getting old.
There's nothing "interesting" about a release clause. When you settle a lawsuit, that's what happens (or else why the hell would they settle in the first place?) Note: nobody was forced to join the class action.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
"It's a measly computer program, when all is said and done."
No, it's a $300.00+ program, and that's not counting (the price of) the time and effort wasted using Microsoft products instead of better products that were forced out of the market by Microsoft's illegal business practices.
I'll stop complaining when the payout per-plaintiff is an appreciable fraction of the retail price of the software.
I realize that the actual costs involved in suing a company like Microsoft can be astronomical, but for the legal firms in such a case to charge full rate for the entire effort is obscene. Their profit on such cases should be capped at something reasonable, like 5-20% of their actual costs (filing fees, supporting research, etc. and not the lawyer's time. Their time is what the percentage is to cover, not double-dipping as both an hourly employee and as a profit-sharing partner of the firm.)
Realistically if such limits were imposed across the board, 90% of the frivolous lawsuits in court would go away. It's the leeching lawyers who often advise their clients to continue, knowing full well that they're going to take the majority of the settlement as "legal costs".
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
"But what are the lawyers going to do with $48 million dollars worth of retail coupons towards a Linux distribution purchase?"
That's the point. The lawyers would never think of accepting vouchers for their plaintiffs if they were being paid the same way.
It does bear mentioning that while the lawyers involved are getting a rather tidy sum of cash, it does only amount to 20% of the total. If the lawyers were all saints and accepted no money for their slaying of the MS dragon, the payouts would have gone from, and I agree that it's a silly small amount, $5 to $12 to... $6 to $14.40.
If the payout seems rediculously small compared to how much MS's actions cost consumers, then it's less the fault of the lawyers skimming the payouts and more the fault of the anti-trust system that allows MS to profit billions from it's illegal monopolies and only pay millions when caught.
On the broader topic of 'frivolous' lawsuits, I do deeply recommend to people that are interested in a fair society that they educate themselves about where that particular piece of memetic propaganda is coming from. It's not from anybody that has your interests as a citizen or consumer at heart.
In my opinion, lawyers for class action lawsuits should be paid, "in like manner and no more than 10x the individual payout."
So that means the lawyers should get $120 worth of Microsoft coupons. That seems fair to me. Hell, I'd even be willing to increase it to 100x the individual payout, but the "in like manner" needs to stay. I've been screwed before with the coupon payouts (BoA many years ago), and won't have anything to do with class action lawsuits because of that.
Under the current system, the lawyer's only incentive is to enrich themselves, without regard to the clients.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Sure, it was a strange case. Toshiba caved to the tune of about $1 billion because they were worried about treble damages (to the tune of $9.5 billion) being awarded by an unpredictable Texas jury trial.
link
The kicker is that the suit is over a bug in a 10+ year old floppy drive controller chip manufactured by NEC, where neither NEC nor Toshiba ever received a single complaint of data corruption. No customer ever claims to have lost data because of the bug - not even the plaintiffs! The plaintiffs simply started the class action lawsuit because they were sold a "defective product". AFAIK the bug has only been reproduced in specific laboratory conditions and not the real world.
The lawyers were using Toshiba as a test case and then were going to go after HP, Compaq, etc. with similar class action lawsuits. I haven't tracked it, but I don't think they made much progress or we would have heard about it.
Should they have fixed the (known) bug? Probably. Was it worth a class action lawsuit, especially of this magnitude? Absolutely not. This is extortion plain and clear, and the scary thing is it's accelerating. If this keeps up it will eventually be impossible for any business to exist for more than a few years without being sued out of existence by corrupt, opportunistic, money-grabbing lawyers. The minute you make any kind of mistake they pounce, with grossly exaggerated damage figures that aren't even sane, but somehow actually get awarded--especially by jury trials--with an extremely low burden of proof.