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Palm Hit WIth Lawsuit Over Pre Document Handling

Monday, 07 December 2009 19:27


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Palm is already facing increased competition from Android devices. It has also been struggling to get developers to write applications for its nascent webOS, and struggling to remain relevant among smartphone makers. It received still more bad news last Thursday: a lawsuit.

Artifex Software is suing Palm over the PDF (Portable Document Format) viewer found in Palm's Pre smartphone, it said on Thursday. The company alleges in its lawsuit that Palm has copied and integrated Artifex's PDF rendering engine, called muPDF, without licensing the engine properly.

If muPDF is part of an application, than that application, according to Artifex, must be licensed in one of two ways. Either the entire application must be licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), or if the software is not licensed under GPL, then Palm must have a commercial license in order to use muPDF.

Lawsuit Between Yale And Korean University Invokes Honor And Faked Resumes

Monday, 02 November 2009 17:49


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People lie in their resumes all the time, but rarely does it become a battle between two universities and include accusations of a disrespect of culture and honor.

A Korean university sued Yale
after it mistakenly confirmed an art professor
had earned a graduate degree at the Ivy League institution.

NYT: Dongguk University, a 103-year-old Buddhist institution based in Seoul, has accused Yale of negligence and a cover-up after it mistakenly confirmed a Dongguk professor’s claims of having a Ph.D. from Yale. Robert A. Weiner, the lead lawyer for Dongguk, said Yale’s response to the ensuing scandal added insult to the injury, and he denounced “the cultural arrogance of not recognizing the harm you’re doing in Korean culture.”

Yale argues that while it had made mistakes, it did nothing that merited court action.

Read the entire NYT article, which has the background facts (including information of the initial errant fax) here.

The professor at the center of the scandal is Shin Jeong-ah, who the NYT said was a "rising star in the art world" when she was hired by Dongguk in 2005.

But what may seem like a fairly small issue has grown into years long litigation -- the lawsuit was filed in 2008 asking for $50 million and accused Yale of defaming Dongguk, saying the Korean university "was publicly humiliated and deeply shamed in the eyes of the Korean population.”

* Email this * Share this * Print this * Comments () Digg Yahoo! Del.icio.us Facebook Reddit Drudge Google Fark logo Fark Stumble It! Skeptical about lawsuit against Anheuser-Busch

Monday, 02 November 2009 17:47


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Francine Katz, who was once the vice president for communications at Anheuser-Busch, filed a lawsuit last week accusing the brewery of gender discrimination.

I read about the lawsuit with a certain sense of skepticism. Perhaps that's because I'm a male. Or perhaps I'm less than enthusiastic about most lawsuits because I've been sued a few times myself, never for discriminating against an employee — I've never had an employee — but mostly for libel, slander and invasion of privacy, the sorts of sins one might expect from a guy with a smart mouth and a big megaphone.

At any rate, I do not pretend to come to this lawsuit with an unbiased mind, and Katz would not want me as a juror. In fact, there are probably a lot of guys who ought not sit on this jury. That's because one of her complaints is that the brewery encouraged a "frat party" atmosphere, to which many guys would respond, "It's a brewery!"

In a world without men, there would be no large breweries. There would be a few micro-breweries, and they would make things like diet strawberry ale. Your basic high-caloric lager would not be a big seller.

Cintas settles employment lawsuit

Monday, 21 September 2009 18:27

Cintas Corp. has agreed to a pretrial settlement in a lawsuit that accused its top executives and eight board members of breaching their duties to shareholders and failing to effect company compliance with worker safety and employment laws.

It’s at least the second settlement deal Cintas has struck in the past month. In August it reached a tentative settlement of a class-action overtime lawsuit in California, agreeing to pay $24 million to avoid disruptive and potentially costly litigation, it said.

As part of the latest proposed settlement, negotiated with the South Carolina law firm Motley Rice LLC, Cintas has agreed to pay the firm $475,000 for fees and expenses. It also agreed to implement various changes in corporate governance related to monitoring safety and compliance with laws and policies related to safety.

The deal was approved by a special litigation committee of Cintas’s board formed earlier this year. It consists of the only two board members who were not named as defendants in the lawsuit. They are Ron Tysoe, who joined the board in January 2008, and former Procter & Gamble Co. legal chief James Johnson, who was added to the board earlier this year for the express purpose of serving on the litigation committee. The two-man panel was charged with investigating the allegations made in the Manville lawsuit and determining how the company should respond.

The $475,000 legal bill would be paid by Cintas’s insurance carrier. In the settlement agreement, Cintas officials deny that they breached any duty and state that they acted in good faith and with reasonable business judgment.