Samsung wants the 13 class actions stemming from its summertime data breach transferred to and consolidated in the U.S. District Court for Nevada in Las Vegas, or alternatively the Southern District for New York in Manhattan, the company told the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) in a response Wednesday (case number 3005). The plaintiffs are evenly split into camps that want the cases moved to the Northern California district in San Francisco or the New Jersey district in Newark.
DirecTV named 10 defendants, plus 10 John Does and 10 “XYZ” companies, in a complaint Tuesday (docket 6:22-cv-00423) in U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas in Tyler that it said “seeks to terminate” an ongoing “imposter fraud scheme” uncovered after “a months-long investigation.”
About 100 Video Privacy Protection Act complaints have been filed in the past year, and the legal theories in the current wave of lawsuits involve a “novel refocusing” of the statute, partly to encompass technologies that weren't even envisioned when the law was enacted more than three decades ago, Wiley associate Tyler Bridegan told a Wiley webinar Thursday.
An apparent rift is developing in the dozen or more fraud class actions over Samsung’s summertime data breach, between plaintiffs who want the cases consolidated and transferred to the U.S. District Court for Northern California and those who want them centralized and moved to the U.S. District Court for New Jersey.
Plaintiffs in the antitrust class action to overturn T-Mobile's buy of Sprint “hammered out an agreement in principle” with T-Mobile to begin “some limited foundational discovery” in the case, plaintiffs’ attorney Brendan Glackin of Lieff Cabraser told U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin in Northern Illinois in a telephonic status hearing Friday. Seven AT&T and Verizon customers brought the class action, saying the transaction caused their rates to skyrocket through reduced competition in the wireless space. Durkin on Oct. 7 denied T-Mobile’s motion to transfer the case to the Southern District of New York, where U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero wrote the early-2020 opinion that enabled the deal to go forward (see 2210110003). The case has been somewhat in limbo as the plaintiffs work to serve court papers on a foreign defendant, Deutsche Telekom, through “diplomatic channels,” said Glackin. He still anticipates the process will be complete by January, he said. Durkin asked the parties to file a joint motion summarizing their agreement to proceed with limited discovery. T-Mobile attorney Rachel Brass of Gibson Dunn said her client will withdraw as “moot” its pending motion to stay the case, pending service on overseas defendants, as soon as Durkin accepts the joint motion. The judge set the next telephonic status hearing for Jan. 27.
The first U.S. jury trial under the 2008 Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act “ended with a bang” when the BNSF Railway was hit with a $228 million judgment Oct. 12 for “recklessly or intentionally” violating the statute, the Perkins Coie law firm said in a Tuesday update. Plaintiff Richard Rogers sued BNSF in April 2019. He was a truck driver who dropped off and picked up loads at BNSF-operated rail yards. He was required to register with an automated gate system and to provide his fingerprint each time he entered the railyard. Rogers didn't give written consent to the collection of his fingerprints, nor was he informed of how long his fingerprint data would be stored, as required under the BIPA, said Perkins Coie. Court records show about three dozen BIPA lawsuits at various stages of disposition. In one of the more recent cases, Amazon and Amazon Web Services said last month they “expressly deny” the allegations in a complaint in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois that they violated the BIPA by using the company’s Rekognition facial-imaging technology to monitor employees in Amazon fulfillment centers (see [Ref:2209220050[).
The renewed application from Chinese company Sailed Technology asking the U.S. District Court for Western Washington to compel discovery from Amazon for a patent infringement case in China is the culmination of “a seven-year litigation campaign against Amazon, consisting of dozens of lawsuits in China and three lawsuits here in the U.S.,” said Amazon’s response Monday (docket 2:22-cv-01396). Sailed seeks to serve subpoenas on Amazon for deposition testimony and documents connected with a case brought in an intellectual property court in Nanjing, China, in which Amazon Echo and Fire products are alleged to have infringed one or more Sailed patents (see 2210110001).
The Motion Picture Association, on behalf of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, served five Digital Millennium Copyright Act subpoenas Thursday on content delivery network Cloudflare and Tonic, a national domain name registry, court records show. The subpoenas, requested through the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, order the companies to produce the identities of individuals affiliated with websites in their spheres believed to have “exploited” ACE members’ “exclusive rights in their copyrighted motion pictures without their authorization,” said a declaration (docket 2:22-mc-00197) in support of the petitions by Jan van Voorn, MPA executive vice president and chief-global content protection. ACE “is a global coalition of leading content creators and on-demand entertainment services committed to supporting the legal marketplace for video content and addressing the challenge of online piracy,” said van Voorn’s declaration. ACE members include the five major studios, plus Amazon and Netflix. Cloudflare and Tonic didn’t respond Tuesday to requests for comment.
U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika in Wilmington, Delaware, signed an order Thursday (docket 1:22-cv-01341) granting Averon’s motion for leave to file under seal its complaint alleging AT&T and mobile sign-in app ZenKey “misappropriated” its trade secrets.
Plaintiffs in the nine class actions filed so far accusing Samsung of negligence in the summer’s data breaches asked the Judicial Panel on Multi-District Litigation to transfer and consolidate the cases in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco and assign them to District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley, said their Oct. 7 motion (case no. 3005).