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AMD Claims Intel Inadvertently Destroyed Evidence in Antitrust Case
Marcus Yam writes "In an unpublished statement to the U.S. District Court of Delaware, AMD alleges Intel allowed the destruction of evidence in pending antitrust litigation. According to the opening letter of the AMD statement, 'Through what appears to be a combination of gross communication failures, an ill-conceived plan of document retention and lackluster oversight by outside counsel, Intel has apparently allowed evidence to be destroyed.'"
...at least they aren't claiming Intel did it on purpose. I would hate to see AMD turn into the next SCO.
My sig can beat up your sig.
Historically e-mail systems were never designed for intensive archiving and ad-hoc searching across the database. In fact, even the current generation of systems require bolt-on archivers to meet the new federal evidence requirements. And I talk to people every day at very large entities that are still using Outlook Express, local mailbox storage, and have no usable archiving system.
Suggesting that the inability to search e-mail in legacy systems is "destruction of evidence" is more than a bit silly in my personal opinion.
sPh
I work at Intel and the retention policy is VERY short on sent items and equally short for all the other mail folders in the inbox. I hear of people losing emails all the time because of this. Hell, I have lost a few sent emails myself. Also, from what I heard (from friends in IT) that we only keep a backup of 7 days of all the exchange server data only for disaster/worst case scenario reasons.
The claim of poor retention is increasingly a stock claim made by plaintiff's lawyers. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure increasingly place a discovery burden on all organizations. Anything and everything electronically stored is subject to electronic discovery, and if you don't have a retention policy that deals with what is subject to discovery when litigation is "reasonably foreseeable", you can be sure the opposing attorneys will point that out, even if it is BS.
#!
They way things are going its going to be illegal to delete emails ever. 1000 years from now people will be reading our emails full of bad jokes, pictures of kittens, and viagra spam.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
The documents were not destroyed on purpose. They were destroyed by error due to the division bug of a Pentium 1 processor.
Sorry, AMD.
-- Rastignac was here.
What, exactly, does this have to do with my rights online?
... they mostly just sell chips... man these are tough... must be over-fried or something.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
But if it's policy (written policy) and it's not in conflict with laws then there can't really be any negative outcomes. You just point to the policy and say, 'this is our policy'.
Handy if you are a corporate attorney.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
I am definitely an AMD CPU fan boy but the corp itself I have no loyalty too especially with stuff like this going on. I doubt few major corporations have a valid working archive of all emails sent and received. I worked for a decent size corp for years ,around 1500 employees with email, and server side we retained 7 days at the most. It would cost a ton and if the allegations are true in Intel's case wouldn't help to have those emails anyway. As stated earlier this is just typical lawyer tactics. It still leaves AMD in a not so great light.
WTF?
I have all my emails dating back to like 1998 on my computer and backed up to 3 different hard drives out of which 1 gets replaced every 2 years. I have it organised by person even. I've yet to have a drive fail on my email computer but I don't want it happening anytime soon. I do delete all spam on a semi monthly basis. Sure my file is large but its handy when looking for old programs or emails that need finding for information thats been lost in the corporate structure. It scares my boss a little in that I have every single email we've ever exchanged for the last 6-7 years. But then again I don't work for a fourtune 500 company.
This isn't an allegation. Intel has acknowledged losing documents. URL:http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/bus iness/16843055.htm
When a government contractor returned the notebook computer he'd been given to perform his job with only the files on it that had been there when it had been given to him (government claiming that he was setting up his own competing business during the time he worked for the government, and they expected to find evidence on the notebook once they got it back, but he used, IIRC, a legal secure delete program) they maintainted that the LACK OF data was proof of his guilt.
Does this just happen to the little guy, or should the court now find fully in AMD's favor here? And in the process, send a strong message to all of big business?
After all, this is the same government being pushed to make ISPs retain even more of your personal Internet activities. Shouldn't the punishments be spread around more equally?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It's not all email from all Intel employees that must be retained
1027 case-specific individuals at Intel were identified and from 2005 case initiation date Intel is supposed to have all of their email retained; of these 1027 case-specific persons AMD is allowed to stipulate 471 for court scrutiny of data.
So? When you merely fail to meet your obligation to stop destruction, you're not liable. Just ask New Orleans about Bush/Brown/Chertoff/FEMA. Or Iraq about Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld. Or Bosnia about Serbian genocide.
--
make install -not war
The court instructed Intel to retain all email for 1027 case-specific individuals from the data of case initiation ie 2005.
This has nothing to do with leaving AMD in a not so great light; but it does have everything to do with Intel not properly following court orders - Intel even admitted they screwed up!
At home, not so much, maybe a year's worth when I was switching between Windows and MacOS (pre-X), but I'm fairly certain except for that one year or so, I've got pretty much every email worth keeping somewhere on my Mac. (Outgoing emails are sent on my PC, so I've got that there - my Mac mostly just archives email). By worth keeping, it's stuff like mailing lists and other stuff other than spam.
At work, though, I've inadvertently lost several years worth of email (at least 3+ years). Outlook archived them faithfully, and I moved the archives to the fileserver. I then compressed the pst file with WinZip. No problem so far. Problem is, I then encrypted them using an Authenex A-Key, which encrypted fine, and test documents encrypted and decrypted fine. Unfortunately, it appears binary files aren't quite restored correctly (or were stored incorrectly) and WinZip claims the files are corrupted. I'm guessing the test files were just tolerant of the errors introduced, but I don't know. I suppose I can try again...
Whoever has the gold makes the rules!e .html#4458218604715556001//
More on lost emails here:
http://badhardware.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archiv
It should be possibly to judge legality of a regular company by observing their actions, no matter what their intentions are
Steve Jobs to Linus: "Hey, lets collude and force Microsoft out of the market"
Linus: "Sure, done deal!"
Not much to worry about there.
If a company can break the law just by having specific intentions, we might as well consider them a monopoly and take remedial actions. In case of Intel, they could be required to spin off chip design into a separate company from manufacturing. As Microsoft's judge pointed out, this is better for a company's combined net worth than extensive regulation. It could even improve the bottom line, as chip foundry would get more business by offering its capacity on equal terms.
I mean, if this was the policy on the file servers then that would be pretty bad. However, SMTP is not a "guaranteed delivery" system so it seems to me that the backup policy should treat it accordingly. Here we used to have a 30Meg limit on our exchange server accounts for ALL content. For many people this basically meant that they had to delete some things at least once a month or they wouldn't have room for new email, and now that the limit is a Gig this is still true for a few people. Unlike IBM we have few enough people that we can afford to keep 3 months of a full Exchange backup, but I dread the day that ever have to get anything off that tape since you can't just restore a message or even just a mailbox, but you have to restore the WHOLE DAMNED information store! If I ever am told that I need to remove the limit on the mailboxes due to storage being cheap, I will only do it if I can keep less backups of it, such as just enough for a complete recovery, much like IBM has here.
- Disclaimer: Information in this post deemed reliable but not guaranteed.
I agree that companies should not have to save every email for all time. But the issue here may be something called "litigation hold." Once you are aware of somebody's intent to file legal action, you are required to preserve evidence. Even if you never saved a single email yesterday, if you heard of legal action today, you MUST save every email that could be used as evidence in legal action. In this case, there was a legal action under way. It was Intel's obligation (as well as AMD's obligation) to save every bit, scrap of paper, or recording that may be valuable to either side. Roger Blog: http://www.deathbyemail.com/
Why would anyone want to store more than they legally had to? All you have to do is read this.
And if you don't think they are hanging corporations (rightly and wrongly), you are kidding yourself.
Very levelheaded. How would the comments read if it were Apple accusing Microsoft, I wonder.
Wait, I guess we already know the answer to that.
The court instructed Intel to retain all email for 1027 case-specific individuals from the data of case initiation ie 2005.
...where did the 3 extra people come from?
I am one of those Intel employees targeted by the retention policy.
The problem is simply one of volume. I am supposed to keep all email, sent and recieved, from the date I got the notice forward. This is GB and GB of email, and it's very cumbersome for all involved. Furthermore, nobody realized until recently that you had to keep SENT email, too. The burden of this falls on the users, not on the IT administrators, etc. There aren't extra systems in place to archive email for all of us. The biggest problem here is that after 30 days, email disappears from your inbox (and it's quicker for sent items). You have to manually move all email into a personal folder to archive it.
We recently had another round of interviews to make sure that we all understand and are complying with the retention policy. Obviously, the outside counsel felt that people were not (I know I wasn't to the full extent of the order). It is simply a problem of volume of mail and lack of structured tools to archive the mail rather than a policy of hiding evidence, etc.
From me, pretty much the same.
No, 3 extra as in 1027 = 1024 + 3 . They came so close to having a nice round number, and missed it by 3.
LOL :) - thanks for the laugh