Uber's stock fell 7.6 percent on Friday, its first day as a publicly traded firm. The bloodbath continued on Monday, with Uber's stock price falling by an additional 10.7 percent.
It's a sobering moment for the ride-hailing company. As recently as last October, some Wall Street banks were estimating that the company could be valued as high as $120 billion. At Monday's closing price of $37.10, Uber is worth barely half that, at $62 billion. (The company is worth around $68 billion on a "fully diluted" basis, which counts stock options and other assets that could eventually be converted into shares.)
Monday wasn't a good day for the broader stock market either, but the Standard & Poor's 500 fell a comparatively modest 2.4 percent.
Japanese PC maker Fujitsu’s latest line of business-class laptops goes on sale this week and includes a wide range of devices including a 10.1 inch tablet with a detachable keyboard, laptops with 12.5 inch to 15.6 inch displays, and a computer th…
Japanese PC maker Fujitsu’s latest line of business-class laptops goes on sale this week and includes a wide range of devices including a 10.1 inch tablet with a detachable keyboard, laptops with 12.5 inch to 15.6 inch displays, and a computer that Fujitsu claims is the “lightest business convertible PC… ith an integrated inductive charging […]
Copyright-trolling outfit Strike 3 has suffered a severe blow in a New York federal court. U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein has thrown out over a dozen cases, signaling a variety of problems. Among other things, the Judge noted that the frequency of improperly accused pirates, more than one in three, is alarmingly high.
By filing thousands of lawsuits over the past two years, Strike 3 Holdings swiftly became one of the most active copyright litigants in the U.S.
These cases target people whose Internet connections were allegedly used to download and share copyright infringing content via BitTorrent. In the case of Strike 3, that’s adult content.
As is common in these lawsuits, Strike 3 only knows the defendant by an IP-address. It then asks the courts to grant a subpoena, allowing it to ask Internet providers for the personal details of the alleged offenders so it can send a settlement request.
There has been some pushback against these requests in certain courts. In the Eastern District of New York, for example, U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein slammed on the brakes recently
Judge Orenstein denied motions for expedited discovery in thirteen cases. This means that the adult video company can’t get a subpoena to identify the alleged pirates. While we have incidentally seen similar decisions, the motivation, in this case, is worth highlighting.
The thirteen cases
In his order, the Judge writes that allowing Strike 3 to obtain the identities of the account holders creates a risk.
Specifically, it will put Strike 3 “in a position to effectively coerce the identified subscribers into paying thousands of dollars to settle claims that may or may not have merit, so as to avoid either the cost of litigation or the embarrassment of being sued for using unlawful means to view adult material.”
Strike 3 was willing to give the Court assurances by accepting procedural safeguards on how the subpoenaed information can be used. However, considering the company’s history of avoiding judicial oversight, Judge Orenstein prefers not to issue any subpoenas at all.
And there are more factors at play here. The order mentions that, if subpoenas are issued, it’s likely that Strike 3 will not use the account holders’ details to litigate these cases in court. That’s also backed up by the information the rightsholder shared with the Court.
Since 2017, Strike 3 has filed 276 cases in the district, but zero have gone to trial.
Of the 143 cases that were resolved in the district, 49 resulted in a settlement and 94 were voluntarily dismissed. The latter number includes 50 cases where Strike 3 wasn’t confident that the defendant is the infringer. In other words, people who are likely wrongfully accused.
From the order
This means that in one-third of the resolved cases, Strike 3 has likely targeted the wrong person. This number is “alarmingly high,” according to the Magistrate Judge.
“Strike 3 acknowledges that in many cases, the ‘Doe’ it has sued – that is, the subscriber – will prove to be someone other than the person who engaged in the allegedly unlawful conduct the Complaint describes,” the order reads.
“And as it has now revealed in response to my inquiry, the proportion of such unprovable cases is alarmingly high,” Judge Orenstein adds.
This means that Strike 3 is listing many people as Doe defendants, while it knows that quite a few of these are not the actual infringers.
“It is thus apparent that Strike 3 is deliberately asserting claims in a scattershot fashion against a broad array of individuals simply because it is confident that many of them will be liable – even if almost as many of them are not,” the order reads.
This seems to contradict the requirement that copyright holders should have good faith belief in the merit of their claim. While that’s not a violation of the federal rules per se, the Judge sees it as a reason not to issue the subpoenas.
After all, it is clear that these type of lawsuits are also targeting innocent subscribers.
“While I do not suggest that suing three people because two of them probably committed a provable copyright violation is a technical violation of Rule 11, the certainty that such an approach will impose needless burdens on innocent individuals counsels against a finding of good cause to permit expedited discovery,” the order reads.
Strike 3 also argued that these type of lawsuits are needed to deter others from engaging in copyright infringement. However, the court waved away this argument as well.
Similarly, Judge Orenstein disagrees with Strike 3’s argument that it will be unable to enforce its copyrights if a subpoena is not granted. While this concern is valid, the Judge believes that these types of cases are not the answer, as they are plainly inefficient.
With the latter comment, the order references the work of Idaho Law Professor Annemarie Bridy, who previously published a paper explaining that litigation is not a scalable mechanism to deal with this type of copyright infringement.
In summary, the order delivers a devastating blow to Strike 3 and adds to the recent criticism of these types of lawsuits. If all judges ruled the same way, so-called copyright trolling practice would be finished. However, that’s not the case just yet.
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A copy of the order, which dates back a few weeks and has mostly been flying under the radar, is available here (pdf).
Twenty leading drug companies—including Teva Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Novartis, and Mylan—were in cahoots for years to fix and dramatically inflate the prices of more than 100 generic drugs, in some cases to raising prices "well over 1,000 percent," according to a lawsuit filed late last week by 44 states.
The alleged scheme was intended to ensure that each company was a "responsible competitor" who was "playing nice in the sandbox" to get its "fair share" of profits from the drugs. Those drugs included pills, capsules, ointments, and cream. They range from oral antibiotics, blood thinners, cancer drugs, contraceptives, statins, anti-inflammatory drugs, anti-depressants, blood pressure medications, drugs used to treat HIV, and drugs for ADHD. A full list of the generic drugs can be found here.
"We all know that prescription drugs can be expensive," said New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal in a statement. "Now we know that high drug prices have been driven in part by an illegal conspiracy among generic drug companies to inflate their prices."
Portable batteries that can charge your phone or tablet on the go are a dime a dozen… but portable batteries that can charge your laptop tend to sell for closer to $100 and up. But right now Lenovo is offering a deal on a 14,000 mAh/48 Wh battery…
Portable batteries that can charge your phone or tablet on the go are a dime a dozen… but portable batteries that can charge your laptop tend to sell for closer to $100 and up. But right now Lenovo is offering a deal on a 14,000 mAh/48 Wh battery that can output up to 45 watts, […]
Small, easy policies can crowd out support for more drastic but necessary changes.
Enlarge/ A carbon tax would address carbon emissions across sectors, from industry to transport and residential use. (credit: Shiyang Huang / Flickr)
"Nudge" policies have come in for a lot of positive attention. Small tweaks like changing the default on organ donation to opt in (still allowing people to opt out if they choose) seem to be effective at boosting pro-social behaviors. Nudges also work for things like saving for retirement or using less energy while still allowing people freedom of choice.
But nudges like these are "being used as a political expedient," wrote economists George Loewenstein and Peter Ubel in The New York Times in 2010. Nudges, they wrote, allow "policymakers to avoid painful but more effective solutions rooted in traditional economics." Now, Loewenstein has teamed up with colleagues David Hagmann and Emily Ho on a series of studies showing how this operates. Their results, published today in Nature Climate Change, suggest that if people are offered the chance to support a painless "nudge" policy on energy usage, they seem less likely to support a much more effective carbon tax.
Nudge vs. tax
Nudge policies can be implemented in different ways, but one popular tool is to change a default option to the desired behavior—like employers taking monthly retirement-fund contributions directly out of a paycheck or signing people up with a green energy supplier. Because people are still able to choose the non-default option if they prefer, policies like these are seen as not interfering with individual choice while still ensuring that the positive choice is used more often.
Facebook has sued a data analytics company that operated apps on the Facebook platform for nearly a decade, saying the company misused Facebook data to sell advertising and marketing services. Facebook filed the lawsuit on Friday against Rankwave, a South Korean company, in California Superior Court for the County of San Mateo.
Facebook also suspended Rankwave and its apps from its platform, but Rankwave apparently still has a trove of Facebook user data. Facebook's lawsuit seeks a court order requiring the company to delete Facebook user data and suggests that Rankwave may have sold the user data to other unidentified entities. Rankwave refused to tell Facebook which entities it sold data to and refused to "[p]rovide a full accounting of Facebook user data in its possession," Facebook says.
"Rankwave is an application developer that breached its contract with Facebook by violating Facebook's policies and California law," Facebook's lawsuit alleged. Rankwave has developed and operated apps on the Facebook platform since 2010 and "used the Facebook data associated with Rankwave's apps to create and sell advertising and marketing analytics and models—which violated Facebook's policies and terms," the lawsuit said.
A Korean-speaking hacking group in operation since at least 2016 is expanding its arsenal of hacking tools to include a Bluetooth-device harvester in a move that signals the group’s growing interest in mobile devices.
ScarCruft is a Korean-speaking advanced persistent threat group that researchers with security firm Kaspersky Lab have been following since at least 2016. At the time, the group was found using at least four exploits, including an Adobe Flash zeroday, to infect targets located in Russia, Nepal, South Korea, China, India, Kuwait, and Romania.
In a post published Monday, Kaspersky Lab researchers said they discovered a custom Bluetooth-device harvester created by ScarCruft. The researchers wrote:
A narrowly divided Supreme Court is allowing a group of consumers to move forward with a lawsuit charging that Apple overcharges customers for App Store purchases. Apple had asked courts to throw out the lawsuit, arguing that the law only allowed app developers, not customers, to bring such a case.
The lawsuit has been underway since 2011 and is nowhere close to resolution. The stakes are high. Apple's iOS platform is notable for completely shutting out alternative means of app distribution. Other major software platforms—including Android, Mac OS, and Windows—offer customers the option to download and install software they acquire from third parties without paying a commission to the platform owner. But ordinary iPhone users—those who are unwilling or unable to jailbreak or use developer tools—have no way to install apps other than through the official App Store.
Plaintiffs in this case argue that Apple's 30 percent commission on app sales wouldn't be viable in a competitive app distribution market. The class-action lawsuit seeks refunds on behalf of millions of users who have paid inflated prices for apps as a result of Apple's exclusionary practices.
Lenovo introduced its first “mixed reality” headsets since 2017, but like most devices designed to use Microsoft’s Windows Mixed Reality platform, the Lenovo Explorer was really more of a virtual reality headset that blocked out the r…
Lenovo introduced its first “mixed reality” headsets since 2017, but like most devices designed to use Microsoft’s Windows Mixed Reality platform, the Lenovo Explorer was really more of a virtual reality headset that blocked out the real world and replaced it with a virtual one. The company’s new ThinkReality A6, meanwhile, is a true augmented reality […]
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