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After Toshiba's settlement, Others Follow (Law)suit
Can Savas writes "After Toshiba's $2.1 Billion settlement of the lawsuit
on the "probably" faulty floppy controller, others have
filed lawsuits against Compaq,
HP, Packard Bell/NEC and eMachines. I wonder where these
lawsuits are heading but I guess some will strike it rich (having
suffered nothing at all to boot). These lawsuits show how
unsufficient the jury system is for cases like this where the
jury is likely to be clueless. If any of these manufacturers end
up settling or losing the suit, then there might be some real
problems for the entire industry. "
Isn't a jury supposed to be made up of "peers". But WHOSE peers? The plaintiff's or the defendent's? In most cases the peers of these two groups are identical. But in a case like this, clearly at least 50% of the jury should be people with technical expertise, computer engineers, etc.
Right? Is there a lawyer in the house?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
now that is want i like to see :)
Jury selection isn't likely to change anytime soon, and I don't think it should -- the idea is sound. What I don't understand is how the Toshiba case (and many others) ever became so inflated. $2 Billion. Seriously, I don't have all the facts, but could their floppy-problem have actually caused that much loss?
Thoughts anyone?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Computer manufacturers offer warranties on their products just like any other company that makes a product. When the part is defective, they issue a recall. Some, like Dell with the Western Digital issue are proactive and call their customers to let them know when the technician will be coming out to replace the drive. Others try to bury it under the rug. Neither really deserves sued. That's why we have places like the Better Business Bureau. You report a company for slow response, write letters to the CEO, call and complain because the product ise not working as designed, and I can't believe you wouldn't recieve service. I'd prefer to work with and buy products from a proactive company, but I sure can't see myself involved in a class action lawsuit against a pretty reputable company unless I wanted to damage them. I'd take care of the issue myself and maybe even take them to small claims court where the issue belongs. At least that way I would get full compensation.
That's all the rambling. If there's anything good in what I just said it's your responsibility to pick it out.
One or more of these hardware makers is going to turn there attention toward sueing micros~1 for there poor product quality in the past.
I for one look forward to the day when micros~1 is held liable for the billions they cost buisness across america in lost productivity.
What this country needs is a healthy dose of tort reform. Anything (well, almost) that gets people out of the business of suing other people and into something productive can only be good for the nation. (That especially includes legal maneuvering over ridiculously obvious patents... but that's another thread.)
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
John Dvorak wrote an article around 1989 lambasting the computer industry for the complete and total lack of quality that 5.25" floppies possessed. They were slow, they were loud, and most disturbingly, they lost data with ridiculous ease. (Somebody find me a link to this article. I need it for my files.)
Ten years later, we're using 3.5" disks, and we're in the same situation.
Steve Jobs and the iMac development team had a chance to fix the situation. They recognized that floppies were garbage. They knew they weren't stable by any means. In response...they chose nothing.
Thanks, Steve.
So, floppy disks persist as the one and only truly standard way for moving documents and small files from one machine to another, and maybe even storing them off a hard drive for some period of time. Most of us who build our own computers know--buy Teac, or you might as well throw away your data. Most of us who build our own computers do so because ten more dollars for a part that can be trusted is worth it for us, but for a large scale company churning out thousands of boxes, ten more dollars per unit is suicide if you can get away with using it to pad the bottom line.
This is one of those "diseconomies of scale" when it comes to large computer companies--saving pennies on a box to remove a feature that everybody expects but only 1% know to check for(like supporting more than 32MB RAM on a certain motherboard, Compaq)--that keep the little guys in business.
Anyway, I must say I'm not entirely displeased with the tremendous pain about to be inflicted on those who have been knowingly distributing fatally flawed 3.5" disk technology in an effort to save money. I spent two years as a volunteer tech at my university--the amount of raw labor I saw go down the drain because of floppies gone terribly wrong was shocking, as was the amount of disks that simply couldn't handle a Linux boot disk. Imagining large corporations going through the same kind of pain I've watched a relatively small population of students go through is frightening, to say the least.
Of course, there will be some companies defending their negligence by saying the minimal quality standards were "common industry practice". So too were the falsified 15"/17" monitor statistics that lead to the "Viewable Size in Every Advertisement" agreement. Lets not even begin to mention the coming slap down of the entire 56K modem industry, which was all too happy to claim speeds twice as fast when even in the most generous contexts it wasn't the case. And, of course, sooner or later, Inkjet Printer manufacturers will get their due--8 pages a minute? Yeah, if you're printing a period.
But what's critical is that while faking monitor sizes only strained a few eyeballs, and slow modems and printers maybe caused a missed deadline or two, substandard(hell, plain old standard) floppy drives caused data loss that directly led to wasted employee hours and lost property.
I can't have too much mercy here. I've done the recoveries, I've gotten the pleading phone calls, I've thanked Word's Autorecovery feature innumerable times(and cursed Windows' awkwardness at saving to hard drive and making only a copy for the floppy).
It may have taken a very long while for the industry to be taken to task on this, but hopefully we'll finally see a stable portable media standard arise from the legal ashes.
About time.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
- The settlement of the Toshiba suit, and the copycat suits against Compaq, HP et al.
- The patent on "date windowing" and the legal action over it.
- The growing political awareness and clout of tech companies in Washington.
The tech sector of the economy may be the only force in America which has more money to throw around than the trial lawyers. With the ATLA putting its sights on Silicon Valley, this is going to come down to war. The ATLA has been playing the legislation game far longer than the tech sector, but money is a great leveller. When this shakes out, we may actually have two things which are near and dear to all our hearts:- Tort liability reform, where the "lottery" aspect is dealt with, and
- Patent reform, which puts more emphasis on genuine novelty and cuts the term of protection down to something sensible for the industry (or imposes mandatory licensing).
Unfortunately, getting there means that the tech sector has to speak with one voice. That's going to be awfully hard for this fractions, contentious, individualistic bunch to do... but it's very important if we're to have a future!--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
NEC shipped Versa laptops with defective motherboards from about 1995 to 1998. They've quietly admitted to the problem, but have not issued any general recall or settlement. Some larger customers got discounts on new equipment, but people had to go through warranty service, where they replaced one defective motherboard with another defective motherboard. I've even been told that power management is "unsupported" on these machines - all of which are supposedly Windows logo certified, which at the very least should mean that APM works.
This is not an isolated example -- there's been millions of fundamentally defective systems dumped on the public over the years. Furthermore, there's very little government protection in this area, mostly because the PC parts market is made up a large number of obscure and offshore companies. Most users rarely expand their memory or run an intensive operating system which might uncover hardware stability or data loss problems, or if they do, they are content to just blame Microsoft Windows. (I see people on Slashdot doing this all of the time. "NT Sucks - I keep getting memory parity errors!")
Toshiba should be given credit for rectifying a minor problem with what have been generally good machines. I'd like to see this huge settlement bring the sharks out of the water -- it might get these clowns to clean up their act and stop peddling defective merchendise.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I am a lawyer, but this isn't legal advice. If you need some, see a laywer licensed in your jurisdiction.
The original idea of a jury was that the king's judges would have their bailiffs round up the men of the town as a jury, since they're the ones that knew what happened (a disqualification today).
Rather than a jury of twelve random people, there are many cases where we'd be better off with, say, three people who know the subject matter, or a group with one of each kind of special knowledge needed--an engineer, a programmer, etc.
We already have "special verdicts" rather than "general verdicts" as a possiblity--rather than yes/no and a number, the jury issues findings point by point, which can be assembled by the judge. The experts could also issue such findings.
And going back to a weregild concept on injuries might be a good idea--an arm is worth X dollars, a leg Y, a death Z, and so forth . . .
The problem is not so much with the concept, as with the execution. If jury members were required to have some knowledge of the issue at hand (all have to be EE's in Toshiba's case), and lawyers weren't allowed to be lawmakers (a conflict of interest like that would land you in jail in just about any other profession), a lot of these problems wouldn't exist.
Hey guys, we're not talking about a company that shipped defective products. That's not the issue at all.
Anybody can ship defective products and not be sued at all: Anybody can fail.
The issue is that they damn well knew the problem, and as a matter of policy, shoved the crap down the throat of unknowing customers, thinking that it wouldn't be discovered it anyway.
And then it becomes one big, massive scam. Then, they haven't dealt in good faith any longer; on the contrary, they've massively misrepresented facts, subverted the truth, lied and cheated for ten years in a row.
Ok, Toshiba, how much money did you make by doing that?
That's the minimum you gonna pay in punitive damages.
If it's true that Toshiba shipped a large number of laptops with defective parts then why is this so wrong?
I recall watching a movie years ago based upon a car company that knew it's cars would explode if hit "just right" while in an accident. The car company went to the bean counters who told them that it would cost X million dollars to do a recall and fix the problem while it was probable that it would only cost them X/2 million dollars to settle lawsuits for people injured or killed due to the defect. Guess which option the car manufacturer chose ?
It's true that getting a defective part in a laptop is not in the same as being killed due to a defective car part, but you get my point (I hope).
I agree that litigation is way out of hand, but companies need to be held accoutable. When power and money and greed become the driving force behind large corporations, or any business, they had better be prepared to deal with the results.
These lawsuits show how unsufficient the jury system is for cases like this where the jury is likely to be clueless.
:)
The jury is clueless by design. In fact, showing some knowledge of the subject at hand is usually enough cause for one of the attorneys to bounce you off the jury. Rationale being, I suppose, that if the jury knows nothing of the subject, you avoid having cliques of clueful geeks tieing up the legal process with irrelevantly useful arguments.
"Throw her in the Trough of Truth!"
It's so easy to sue someone nowadays. Maybe there'll be a checkbox on the 1040 forms with "Lawsuits" as primary source of income...
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Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
I am all against frivolous lawsuits is the first thing I would like to say...
;-)
... however the software and hardware industries need to be more accountable for their products. As I work for a smaller web and multimedia-design company, we are very aware that delivering our clients a reliable, working product is very important.
I have read some discussion lately of new laws that would potentially allow US software companies to supply warranties that absolve them of all responsibility from bugs their software causes.
Personally, I feel that I would rather have soft(/hard)ware companies be held *more* responsible for their products than less. However a lawsuit of this type seems ridiculous as well. We need something inbetween - but if companies have warranties that protect them when they ship faulty products, what can we do to threaten them with the message that delivering reliable products is what the consumers want?
Thankfully the Open Source and Free Software movements seem to be helping increase software reliability through peer checking. Let's just hope that such systems become more pervasive in the next millennium and filter through to the hardware companies as well. It would be nice (though unrealistic) if we could make lawyers redundant through cooperation and open working methods
A little planning goes a long way...
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
What disturbs me the most about this type of class action suit is that the consumers seldom get more than a token award: a coupon towards the purchase of another of the manufacturer's products, or a few hundred dollars. Meantime, the lawyers collect millions in fees. I understand that these suits often get started when a law firm gets word of a problem and recruits "harmed" consumers to representative of the class. It's legalized extortion on the part of the law firms, nothing else.
I'm wary of tort reform as it has been presented in the past, because it tends to rob consumers of their rights to recompense for real damages. But I think some restrictions on legal fees would do wonders for the legal system. If lawyers could collect only a reasonable amount, we'd see fewer extortion suits, but consumers with real complaints would not be restricted in their rights to sue and collect damages.
No sig? Sigh...
The problem is that most people today are incapable of
Instead, the jurors make a snap, emotional decision, then stick with it, regardless of the facts or reason. In a case like this, the jurors say "You've suffered (somehow), and so we're going to give you a large sum of money. After all, WE aren't paying for it, insurance is." Of course, insurance isn't paying it, we are (via higher costs, premiums, etc.) but all the jurors want it to get back to watching Wheel of Fortune.
Perhaps instead of the current means of jury selection (Show up on this date or else!), what we should do is more like
This way:
Of course, the system would still have to compel employers to allow employees to take jury duty time without using vacation time, but they do this for Reserve duty anyway.
Of course, we'd then need MetaJury duty (review these 10 cases and decide it they were unfair, fair, or no opinion...)
www.eFax.com are spammers
Accountable for what, exactly? The plaintiffs didn't claim to have actually lost data, much less valuable data; they just said it was theoretically possible. Toshiba should pay full damages: $0.
And if you want to talk punitive damages to teach Toshiba a lesson for even taking the risk, then do you really think $2 billion is a fair price?
substantial penalties assessed against them (the suit might very well be
a reasonable and valid one) - the problem is that in the US you can bring a
lawsuit against a company or person with no risk whatsoever to yourself.
Think about these other mechanisms for potentially becoming wealthy:
In every case the opportunity for massive financial advancement is present
(just like in a lawsuit) but in every case *you* are required to risk something
initially in order to make yourself eligable for those financial windfalls.
I have had enough of this horsesh*t, what we need to do is:
your case you pay the entirety of your opponent's legal fees
plus an additional penalty for the time you have wasted
side's fees an attorney is free to shoulder the burden in exchange
for a healthy percentage should the case be proven
Lawsuit abuse costs us all, you can see the toll it has taken in
the cost of insurance, health care and many of the products we buy. We
are have become a nation of freeloaders and leeches and I don't believe
I am alone when I state that I am sick of it.
there are two kinds of people in this world - those who divide people into two groups and those who don't