A plaintiff in a lawsuit that accuses firms including Apple Inc and Google Inc of conspiring to hold down salaries has asked a US court to reject a US$324 million settlement.
Michael Devine, one of the four named plaintiffs in a class action of 64,000 people, described the tentative settlement as “grossly inadequate” in a letter to the judge in the case.
The offer is about one-tenth of experts’ estimates of potential damages and lacks any penalty, he said.
“The class wants a chance at real justice,” Devine wrote to US Judge Lucy Koh on Sunday. “We want our day in court.”
Tech workers filed the lawsuit against Apple, Google, Intel Inc and Adobe Systems Inc in 2011, alleging they conspired to refrain from soliciting one another’s employees to avert a salary war.
The workers planned to ask for US$3 billion in damages at a trial set to begin at the end of this month, court filings said. That could triple to US$9 billion under US antitrust law.
“As an analogy,” Devine wrote, “if a shoplifter is caught on video stealing a US$400 iPad from the Apple Store, would a fair and just resolution be for the shoplifter to pay Apple US$40, keep the iPad, and walk away with no record or admission of wrongdoing? Of course not.”
The case has been closely watched due to the potentially high damages and the chance to explore Silicon Valley’s elite. The case is based largely on e-mails in which Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and some of their rivals allegedly planned to avoid poaching each other’s prized engineers.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained