Category: court

BlockFi names the collateral as “including certain shares of common stock.” In May, Bankman-Fried acquired a 7.6% stake in the online brokerage firm Robinhood, buying a total of $648 million in Robinhood shares through his Emergent investment company.

Google and Activision Blizzard both denied Epic’s allegations about competing app stores. Google said the agreements are designed to provide incentives for developers to create apps for Google Play. “Epic is mischaracterizing business conversations,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “It does not prevent developers from creating competing app stores, as Epic falsely alleges.” Activision, for its part, said Google never “asked us, pressured us, or made us agree not to compete with Google Play.” Activision is in the midst of being acquired by software giant Microsoft for $68.7 billion. […] The filing is the latest allegation in Epic’s ongoing lawsuit against Google, which it accuses of operating a monopoly with Google Play, which sells apps for Android. Epic’s ongoing lawsuit is similar to another battle it’s waging against Apple and its App Store over similar concerns of monopolistic practices. In both cases, Epic is pushing the companies to reduce the control they exert over their respective platforms, both in terms of how phone and tablet owners pay for apps and where to download them from.

It’s unclear whether Epic’s argument that Google paid developers to not compete will win in an eventual court case. Epic said in its complaint that “Google understood” the agreement would mean that Activision would “abandon its plans to launch a competing app store, and Google intended this result.” But Armin Zerza, now Activision Blizzard’s finance chief, said in one of the court filings that the company chose not to launch a rival app store because of the risk of failure, in addition to costs for development and marketing. When asked about entering a deal with Google that “accomplished your objectives,” Zerza said that the Activision Blizzard board approved a deal with the Android maker because it “created multi-hundred-million dollars of value for us across multiple ecosystems.” If Activision is ultimately purchased by Microsoft though, it may end up helping create an app store after all. Microsoft told regulators in October that it intends to build its own mobile app store to rival Google and Apple. Activision’s deep library of popular games, including Candy Crush Saga and World of Warcraft, will be a key part of that effort. “Epic’s allegations are nonsense,” an Activision representative said in a statement sent to PC Gamer. “We can confirm that Google never asked us, pressured us, or made us agree not to compete with Google Play — and we’ve already submitted documents and testimony that prove this.”

A jury found Holmes guilty in January of four counts of investor fraud and conspiracy. Her sentencing is scheduled for 18 November, and she faces a maximum 20 years in prison. Prosecutors argued that “considering the extensiveness of Holmes’s fraud”, their recommended sentencing would “reflect the seriousness of the offenses, provide for just punishment for the offenses, and deter Holmes and others”.

Holmes’s lawyer argued in documents filed on Thursday that the ex-Theranos boss should not be sentenced to prison at all and, at most, should receive 18 months of house arrest. The court filings argued that Holmes had been made a “caricature to be mocked and vilified” by the media over the years, though she is a caring mother and friend.

“Ms Holmes is no danger to the public,” Holmes’s lawyer said in the court documents. “She has no criminal history, has a perfect pretrial services compliance record, and is described by the people who know her repeatedly as a gentle and loving person who tries to do the right thing.”

The companies settled their underlying fight in 2019, signing an agreement worth billions of dollars that let Apple continue using Qualcomm chips in iPhones. The settlement included an Apple license to thousands of Qualcomm patents, but allowed the patent-board proceedings to continue. The board upheld the patents in 2020, and Apple appealed to the patent-specialist U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Cupertino, California-based Apple argued it had proper legal standing to appeal because San Diego-based Qualcomm could sue again after the license expires, potentially as soon as 2025.

A Federal Circuit three-judge panel, in a 2-1 ruling, dismissed the case last year for a lack of standing, finding that Apple’s risk of being sued again was speculative and the challenge would not affect its payment obligations under the settlement. Qualcomm has again argued that Apple has not shown a concrete injury to justify the appeal, just like in the “materially identical” case that the high court rejected.

“I felt that it was a question on my integrity as a physician not to remain there and to continue to bolster results I essentially didn’t have faith in,” Rosendorff said while on the witness stand in 2021, according to CNBC. “I came to understand that management was not sincere in diverting resources to solve issues.” Now, Holmes and her lawyers are claiming that Rosendorff left a voicemail and then showed up at Holmes’ residence on August 8 in a desperate bid to communicate that he “felt he had done something wrong, apparently in connection with Ms. Holmes’ trial.” The motion, supposedly paraphrasing Rosendorff, says that the former Theranos employee stated, “the government made things seem worse than they were.”

In the document, Holmes’ legal team wrote, “Under any interpretation of his statements, the statements warrant a new trial under Rule 33. But, at a minimum, and to the extent the Court has any doubt about whether a new trial is required, the Court should order an evidentiary hearing and permit Ms. Holmes to subpoena Dr. Rosendorff to testify about his concerns.” Holmes was found guilty in January on four of 11 charges defrauding the company’s investors and patients. She was found not guilty on four counts.

In July, Balwani was found guilty of 12 counts of conspiracy and fraud against certain investors and patients.

An ad tech complaint, which Bloomberg had reported was in the works last year, would mark the DOJ’s second case against Google following the government’s 2020 lawsuit alleging the tech titan dominates the online search market in violation of antitrust laws. Still undecided is whether prosecutors will file the case in federal court in Washington, where the search case is pending, or in New York, where state attorneys general have their own antitrust case related to Google’s ad tech business […].

The case arose when the student and his friends visited a thrift shop on a Friday night. There, they posted a picture on Snapchat with an offensive joke about violence against Jews. He deleted the post and shared an apology just a few hours later, but the school suspended and eventually expelled him. […] The Tenth Circuit held the First Amendment protected the student’s speech because “it does not constitute a true threat, fighting words, or obscenity.” The “post did not include weapons, specific threats, or speech directed toward the school or its students.” While the post spread widely and the school principal received emails about it, the court correctly held that this did not amount to “a reasonable forecast of substantial disruption” that would allow regulation of protected speech.

The judge said the employees don’t plan to sue the users in Ontario. “Whether they sue in the U.S. or just give the name to the police, I am satisfied that the exceptional equitable remedy ought to be available to identify people who harass others, with base racism, who dox, abuse personal information, and make overt threats of physical harm and death,” he said. “Our mission is to provide everyone with an affordable way to communicate, and we place a high value on the safety and privacy of our users,” a TextNow spokesperson said in an email to The Record. “From time to time, we receive lawful requests for information. We comply with all valid requests as required by law.”

It turned out the published articles tipped the scales: Getting a public Wikipedia article increased a case’s citations by more than 20 percent. The increase was statistically significant, and the effect was particularly strong for cases that supported the argument the citing judge was making in their decision (but not the converse). Unsurprisingly, the increase was bigger for citations by lower courts — the High Court — and mostly absent for citations by appellate courts — the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal. The researchers suspect this is showing that Wikipedia is used more by judges or clerks who have a heavier workload, for whom the convenience of Wikipedia offers a greater attraction.
“To our knowledge, this is the first randomized field experiment that investigates the influence of legal sources on judicial behavior. And because randomized experiments are the gold standard for this type of research, we know the effect we are seeing is causation, not just correlation,” says Thompson, the lead author of the study. “The fact that we wrote up all these cases, but the only ones that ended up on Wikipedia were those that won the proverbial ‘coin flip,’ allows us to show that Wikipedia is influencing both what judges cite and how they write up their decisions.”

“Our results also highlight an important public policy issue,” Thompson adds. “With a source that is as widely used as Wikipedia, we want to make sure we are building institutions to ensure that the information is of the highest quality. The finding that judges or their staffs are using Wikipedia is a much bigger worry if the information they find there isn’t reliable.”

The paper describing the study has been published in ” The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence.”

While “fish” is “commonly understood to refer to aquatic species, the term of art employed by the Legislature … is not so limited,” Associate Justice Ronald Robie wrote for the appeals court. CESA itself does not define “fish,” but the law is part of the California Fish and Game Code. The code’s definition includes any “mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate (or) amphibian,” Robie wrote. All those categories “encompass terrestrial and aquatic species,” and the state legislature has already approved the listing of at least one land-based mollusk, the opinion said.