The former vice president of finance at Koss Corp. entered a not-guilty plea Friday on charges she embezzled more than $31.4 million from the company during the last six fiscal years. The former executive, Sujata (Sue) Sachdeva, 46, remains free on $50,000 bond and has been ordered by the U.S. District Court in Milwaukee to get a mental-health evaluation, court papers show. Koss fired Sachdeva soon after her arrest in late December.
Paul Gluckman
Paul Gluckman, Executive Senior Editor, is a 30-year Warren Communications News veteran having joined the company in May 1989 to launch its Audio Week publication. In his long career, Paul has chronicled the rise and fall of physical entertainment media like the CD, DVD and Blu-ray and the advent of ATSC 3.0 broadcast technology from its rudimentary standardization roots to its anticipated 2020 commercial launch.
The Natural Resources Defense Council doesn’t buy CEA and ITI Council assurances, made during a Thursday phone briefing with reporters (CED Jan 29 p1), that they have no plans to file lawsuits in places other than New York City to stop producer responsibility-based e-waste laws from taking effect, Kate Sinding, senior NRDC attorney, told us in an e- mail. “Why should we be asked to take on good faith that manufacturers have no intention of challenging laws in other states?” Sinding asked. “If it were in fact true that they had no intention of challenging producer responsibility broadly, why did they file a lawsuit that contains no fewer than five constitutional challenges that go to the very heart of the takeback approach? Why not just challenge the specific provisions in the New York City program they claim go further than those in other states? And why did they solicit an amicus brief filed by half a dozen trade associations for other types of products for which producer responsibility is now being applied in various states? The only plausible answer is that the manufacturers do, in fact, want to put the fundamentals of producer responsibility on trial.”
CEA and the ITI Council have “no plans” to use any victory in their New York City e-waste lawsuit to challenge the constitutionality of producer responsibility laws on the books or soon to be enacted in other states, the head environmental officials from both those trade groups told reporters during a telephone briefing Thursday. Both officials said they deem future lawsuits unlikely, but neither would entirely rule them out.
CEA and the ITI Council scheduled a conference call for Thursday to brief reporters on developments in their lawsuit to stop New York City’s e-waste program from taking effect. The session comes two weeks after the Natural Resources Defense Council and its supporters held a call to discuss why the council intervened as a co-defendant in the lawsuit and to allege that CEA and ITI seek to use the case to stamp out throughout the country e-waste laws based on producer responsibility.
The Natural Resources Defense Council’s “long and deep” history with New York City’s e-waste law was the main reason the group intervened as a co-defendant in the lawsuit brought against the city by CEA and the ITI Council, senior NRDC attorney Kate Sinding said in a blog at her group’s website. NRDC also got involved “to ensure that New York City’s takeback law survived industry’s attack,” she said.
CEA and the ITI Council gave a stern rebuke Friday to Electronic Takeback Coalition allegations that their lawsuit to block New York City’s e-waste law from taking effect was a strategy to sidestep a meaningful commitment to take back products. The claim was made by Barbara Kyle, the coalition’s national coordinator, in a Thursday media briefing with reporters (CED Jan 15 p2). It’s “utterly false,” CEA and ITI said in a joint e-mailed statement.
Since e-waste collection problems won’t go away no matter how the New York City e-waste lawsuit is decided, the Natural Resources Defense Council wants to be a part of any settlement talks between the city and CE makers, Kate Sinding, a senior NRDC attorney, told reporters in a briefing Thursday. The briefing was held to summarize the position of groups that oppose CE makers in the lawsuit days before the U.S. District Court in Manhattan was to have heard oral argument. But the court late Wednesday postponed arguments from Jan. 19 to next month, probably Feb. 10, Sinding said. It was at least the third time that the argument has been postponed.
Viewer reaction will be the first metric ESPN studies to gauge the success of ESPN 3D, senior executives with the network told us at CES. ESPN 3D starts June 11 with the World Cup match between Mexico and South Africa, and the network plans to show 85 live events in 3D in its first year (CED Jan 7 p1). “In our situation at ESPN, our fans will let us know, oh my goodness will they let us know,” said Bryan Burns, vice president of strategic business planning. Fan reaction “to me is the first step on the ladder -- if they like what we're doing,” he said. The two years ESPN spent testing 3D “that we didn’t have before” with HD have “given us resolve that this will bring an enhancement to the ESPN experience,” he said. Burns said he thinks that when ESPN 3D airs its first World Cup match in June, it will have “more distribution in place than we had” at the debut of ESPN HD. That won’t necessarily mean a consumer on day one will be able to walk into a Best Buy, take home a 3D flat-panel TV, hook it up to a 3D-capable set-top box and watch the match in 3D, Burns said. But “ESPN can’t control that,” he said. “What we can control is having more distribution in place.” Set makers have told ESPN they plan to ship the first 3D TVs to market earlier than Q4, Burns said. At CES, Panasonic said it thinks it will ship its 3D plasma sets late spring, while Sony Chief Marketing Officer Mike Fasulo told us his company was eying June shipment dates. But neither company discussed the pricing of first-generation sets.
Audiovox left some Black Friday business on the table, sacrificing revenue for profit in its Q3 ended Nov. 30, senior executives said Tuesday on an earnings call. Net sales in the quarter fell 20.4 percent to $155.66 million. For the first nine months of the year, they dropped 17.9 percent to $400.35 million.
California leads the country “in a lot of good ways and a lot of bad ways,” state Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Pacoima, told an energy efficiency panel at CES when asked about energy limits on large-screen TVs recently imposed by the California Energy Commission. Padilla said the commission “didn’t pay enough attention to the concerns of brick and mortar retailers” when it approved the rules. They put retailers at a “competitive disadvantage” to online merchants that can continue to ship energy-guzzling TVs to California consumers without restriction, Padilla said at the session Thursday. Brick-and-mortar retailers that do business in parts of the state that border Nevada also are at a disadvantage, because consumers can cross state lines and shop for unrestricted TVs, he said. Padilla said he and the Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee that he chairs will continue to “pound these issues” until the rules are made fairer to brick-and-mortar retailers.