Legal

Reuters:

Four major tech companies including Apple and Google have agreed to pay a total of $324 million to settle a lawsuit accusing them of conspiring to hold down salaries in Silicon Valley, sources familiar with the deal said, just weeks before a high profile trial had been scheduled to begin.

And:

The case has been closely watched due to the potentially high damages award and the opportunity to peek into the world of Silicon Valley’s elite. The case was based largely on emails in which Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and some of their Silicon Valley rivals hatched plans to avoid poaching each other’s prized engineers.

In one email exchange after a Google recruiter solicited an Apple employee, Schmidt told Jobs that the recruiter would be fired, court documents show. Jobs then forwarded Schmidt’s note to a top Apple human resources executive with a smiley face.

Glad that’s over. I can’t imagine this would be anything but a giant distraction.

From Mark Ames at PandoDaily:

Back in January, I wrote about “The Techtopus” — an illegal agreement between seven tech giants, including Apple, Google, and Intel, to suppress wages for tens of thousands of tech employees. The agreement prompted a Department of Justice investigation, resulting in a settlement in which the companies agreed to curb their restricting hiring deals. The same companies were then hit with a civil suit by employees affected by the agreements.

This week, as the final summary judgement for the resulting class action suit looms, and several of the companies mentioned (Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm) scramble to settle out of court, Pando has obtained court documents (embedded below) which show shocking evidence of a much larger conspiracy, reaching far beyond Silicon Valley.

Confidential internal Google and Apple memos, buried within piles of court dockets and reviewed by PandoDaily, clearly show that what began as a secret cartel agreement between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt to illegally fix the labor market for hi-tech workers, expanded within a few years to include companies ranging from Dell, IBM, eBay and Microsoft, to Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and London-based public relations behemoth WPP. All told, the combined workforces of the companies involved totals well over a million employees.

More info in the post.

With surprising speed, Samsung has now officially filed a notice of appeal over the final judgement in the first Apple vs. Samsung patent trial from 2012. The last ruling in the case was handed down yesterday, when Judge Lucy Koh ruled in Samsung’s favor that sales injunctions on the products it was found guilty of infringing Apple patents with were not warranted in the interests of competition. Apple is likely to appeal that portion of Judge Koh’s rulings.

In the original trial (and the limited damages retrial), none of Samsung’s original counter-claims against Apple were given the time of day by the two juries in the case; all were dismissed due to prior art, while Apple won judgements against Samsung to the tune of nearly $1 billion in penalties against the Korean electronics firm (originally Apple was awarded just over $1.05 billion, but a portion of the damages was re-calculated in a juried damages retrial, with the result being $929 million instead).

Will this never end?

A patent troll by the name of Penovia LLC has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple. The lawsuit claims that Apple’s iPad infringes their acquired patent that’s about a maintenance technique that monitors office machine status without personal attention. This is the typical type of case that the Federal Trade Commission is now studying to find ways to assist tech companies from having to waste their time fighting such suits.

When I see the phrase “acquired patent”, I see red. In my opinion, this type of lawsuit is destructive and serves simply to line someone’s pockets. This needs to be fixed.

Apple takes on the patent trolls. There are quotes from a public filing with the FTC as well as from an amicus brief on a patent fees case. Apple makes its position quite clear.