March 29, 2024

Toyota Will Pay $1.6 Billion Over Faulty Accelerator Suit

Owners who sold their vehicles at a loss through trade-ins and resale will receive from $125 to $10,000, depending on the level of depreciation. The settlement represents the end of the economic battle between Toyota and customers after several years of allegations of mechanical and electronic defects, though it does not cover individual personal-injury and wrongful death lawsuits that are still pending.

“This agreement allows us to resolve a legacy legal issue in a way that provides significant value to our customers and demonstrates that they can depend on Toyota to stand behind our vehicles,” said Celeste Migliore, National Business and Field Communications manager for Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc. The automaker will take a one-time $1.1 billion charge to its earnings cover the settlement costs.

James V. Selna, United States District Court judge of the Central District of California, who presided over the suit since 2010 after widespread reports of complaints and accidents related to unintended acceleration, granted final approval after the terms were proposed in December.

The settlement is “extraordinary because every single dollar in the cash fund will go to claimants,” Judge Selna said in a statement. A decision posted to the court’s Web site calls the settlement “fair, adequate and reasonable.”

Toyota is required as part of the agreement to install safety upgrades in about 3.2 million of its vehicles. The automaker is to establish two funds of $250 million to compensate owners not eligible for safety upgrades and those who sold their cars between Sept. 1, 2009, and Dec. 31, 2010, at a loss.

The settlement also requires Toyota to pay $30 million for automotive safety research on driver behavior and unintended acceleration. It would also provide a customer support program for more than 16 million current Toyota owners, who will be eligible for free repairs on certain parts for up to 10 years.

The sudden acceleration problems marred Toyota’s reputation for quality. The automaker eventually recalled more than 11 million vehicles in connection with problems including floor mats that caused the accelerator to get stuck.

Steve Berman, who represented the plaintiffs in the class-action suit, called the settlement “a significant financial recovery.”

“This is a great settlement for consumers,” he said in a statement. “It includes both safety fixes to make Toyota vehicles safer as well as monetary relief for owners who saw a reduction in their vehicle’s value.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/20/business/toyota-will-pay-1-6-billion-over-faulty-accelerator-suit.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Condé Nast Faces Suit From Interns Over Wages

Two former interns filed a lawsuit against Condé Nast on Thursday, saying the company failed to pay them minimum wage at their summer jobs at W Magazine and The New Yorker, and asked that it be approved as a class-action suit.

Lauren Ballinger, who worked as an intern at W Magazine in 2009, and Matthew Leib, an intern at The New Yorker in 2009 and 2010, said in the suit that Condé Nast, which owns the magazines, paid them less than $1 an hour.

According to court papers filed Thursday morning in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Mr. Leib was paid $300 to $500 for each summer he worked. During that time, he was asked to review pieces for submission to the “Shouts and Murmurs” section and proofread and edit articles for the “Talk of the Town” section. Mr. Leib, a cartoonist, also helped maintain the online cartoon database, did research in the cartoon archives and coordinated the work of cartoon artists, the suit claims. He worked three days a week from 10 a.m. until 5:30 p.m.

A Condé Nast spokeswoman said the company did not comment on litigation.

The case is the latest in a series of lawsuits filed by interns for media companies who have sued for lack of payment. Juno Turner, the lawyer representing Ms. Ballinger and Mr. Leib, said her law firm, Outten Golden, settled a case against the “Charlie Rose” show last year. In February 2012, a former Harper’s Bazaar intern sued Hearst Magazines, asserting that she regularly worked 40 to 55 hours a week without being paid. Last July, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled that the plaintiff could move forward with her lawsuit as collective action that others could join voluntarily. But in May, that same judge ruled that the intern’s parallel claims under New York State’s wage laws could not proceed as a class action.

On Tuesday, a Federal District Court judge in Manhattan ruled that Fox Searchlight Pictures violated federal and New York minimum wage laws by not paying two interns who worked on the film “Black Swan.”

Thursday’s lawsuit cited United States Labor Department guidelines, which consider unpaid internships lawful if they are part of an educational training program and do not replace employees and if the company does not gain immediate advantage from an intern’s work. The work experience also must benefit the intern.

Ms. Ballinger, a graduate of the American University of Paris, said in a phone interview that she saved one credit before graduating to use toward an internship at W. Ms. Ballinger was paid $12 a day to work in W’s accessories department. She said she worked from 8 or 9 a.m. each morning until 8 to 10 p.m. each night, packing, organizing and delivering accessories to editors. She later worked 10-hour days, three days a week, in W’s fine jewelry department, she said.

For both jobs, she said she was trained only by other interns. She said that even one of the editors at W marveled how poor their work conditions were.

The editor said the job was reminiscent of Anne Hathaway’s job in “The Devil Wears Prada,” but worse, “because we don’t get any makeover in the end,” Ms. Ballinger said in the interview.

Ms. Ballinger said she decided to get involved in a class-action lawsuit because W editors failed to give a recommendation to her university that she needed for course credit.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Mr. Leib graduated from Northwestern University and works for AD Lubow, an advertising agency. Ms. Ballinger, who graduated from the New School in January with a master’s degree in media studies, said she was currently looking for a job in digital brand strategy.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/business/media/two-ex-interns-sue-conde-nast-over-wages.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Aereo Wins a Battle, and Broadcasters Are Distressed

A federal appeals court in New York on Monday upheld a ruling in favor of Aereo, the start-up Internet service that streams stations without compensating them. The decision set the stage for a full-blown trial.

The broadcasters, surprised and disappointed, said they were confident they would prevail eventually. But as the legal battles continue, Aereo, for now available only in New York City, plans to offer its service in nearly two dozen more cities this year.

The service’s triumphant backer, the media mogul Barry Diller, said of the ruling: “We always thought our Aereo platform was permissible and I’m glad the court has denied the injunction. Now we’ll build out the rest of the U.S.”

Aereo is able to stream broadcast stations by operating an array of tiny antennas that pick up over-the-air signals. Subscribers paying about $8 a month receive control over one antenna and can select programming over the Internet. Aereo essentially turns the subscriber’s phone, computer or tablet into a small television set, but without the rabbit ears that would normally be needed.

The array of antennas in Brooklyn allows Aereo to avoid paying the retransmission fees that operators like Time Warner Cable and DirecTV pay for access to stations. Those fees are an increasingly important revenue source for the stations, so it is not surprising their owners have sued to protect them.

The broadcasters, including CBS Corporation, Comcast, News Corporation and the Walt Disney Company, filed two suits against Aereo more than a year ago, weeks before the service was made available in New York. But a district court judge denied the request for a preliminary injunction last summer.

The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the lower court ruling on Monday in a 2-to-1 decision, saying that Aereo’s streams of TV shows to individual subscribers did not constitute “public performances,” and thus the broadcasters’ copyright infringement lawsuits against the service “are not likely to prevail on the merits.”

Aereo also includes a digital video recorder not unlike the remote digital video recorder system that was operated by Cablevision and was upheld in court several years ago. Judge Christopher F. Droney pointed to that decision as he affirmed the previous court ruling in favor of Aereo.

Another appeals court judge, Denny Chin, dissented on Monday, calling Aereo’s antenna system “a Rube Goldberg-like contrivance, overengineered in an attempt to avoid the reach of the Copyright Act and to take advantage of a perceived loophole in the law.” He concluded that Aereo’s streams to subscribers were “public performances” and thus violations of copyright.

But the majority opinion gave momentum to Aereo, which announced a plan to expand to 22 more cities in January. Broadcasters aren’t the only ones affected by the technology. While it doesn’t have many subscribers now, Aereo gives television viewers a new and relatively cheap way to subscribe to a limited diet of TV and gives advertisers yet another way to reach those viewers.

Aereo’s wins in court may make other companies more comfortable in joining forces with the service; prospective partners include cable channels that want carriage (Bloomberg TV signed the first such deal with Aereo last year) and wireless providers. And the mere existence of the service may cause the broadcasters to speed up their own plans for streaming programming to phones and tablets.

After the ruling on Monday, analysts suggested that some cable and satellite providers — those that pay billions of dollars in retransmission fees for the right to carry broadcasters’ signals — might start to mimic Aereo’s system to get around the fee requirements, or at least improve their position at the bargaining table. Others predicted that the broadcasters might lobby Congress to change the law.

Undeterred, a group of the plaintiffs, including Fox and PBS, said they intended to move to trial. “Today’s decision is a loss for the entire creative community,” they said in a statement. “The court has ruled that it is O.K. to steal copyrighted material and retransmit it without compensation. While we are disappointed with this decision, we have and are considering our options to protect our programming.”

The broadcasters say they are heartened by a victory in December in Federal District Court in Los Angeles against an Aereo-like service named Aereokiller, backed by the billionaire Alkiviades David. CBS alluded to that ruling when it said in a statement on Monday, “As the courts continue to consider this case and others like it, we are confident that the rights of content owners will be recognized, and that we will prevail.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/business/media/aereo-wins-in-appeals-court-setting-stage-for-trial-on-streaming-broadcast-tv.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

U.S. Court Fines Chinese Vitamin C Makers

SHANGHAI — A group of Chinese vitamin C makers was ordered by a U.S. District Court to pay $162.3 million in fines after a jury found the companies guilty of engaging in price-fixing.

A jury in Brooklyn, New York, returned the verdict Thursday after a group of American companies accused the Chinese producers of acting in concert to raise prices in violation of U.S. antitrust laws.

The case is significant because China produces about 80 percent of the world’s supply of ascorbic acid, or vitamin C, which is a key ingredient in items like food and soft drinks to animal feed, vitamin supplements and even cosmetics.

The Chinese-made vitamins end up as ingredients in products made by major brands like Coca-Cola.

The case was striking because of the unusual defense that the Chinese companies mounted. While admitting in court that they had colluded on setting prices, lawyers representing the Chinese companies said they were compelled to do so by the Chinese government.

In court papers, China’s Ministry of Commerce supported the Chinese companies’ argument.

But lawyers who brought the class-action suit against the Chinese companies said the companies acted on their own and not on government orders.

The jury agreed and voted in favor of a $54 million judgement against four Chinese companies. The U.S. District Court judge in the case trebled the damages, as required by U.S. antitrust law.

Two other Chinese companies involved in the case agreed to pay about $32 million to settle the case. One company settled shortly before the trial began and another settled during the proceedings.

William Isaacson, an attorney for the plaintiffs at Boies, Schiller and Flexner, said the fines would change the way Chinese companies do business in the United States.

“Chinese companies selling products in the U.S. are going to be treated the same as other companies,” Mr. Isaacson said. “There’s a history of cartel prosecutions in the U.S., European cartels, Japanese cartels, Korean cartels. This is the first one against Chinese companies.”

The verdict marks the second time in two decades that vitamin makers have been accused of violating antitrust laws. In 1999, The U.S. Justice Department broke up a “vitamin cartel” that had been led by European companies, including the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche and BASF of Germany. The companies had overcharged big food and beverage makers like Kellogg, Coca-Cola and Nestle. Eventually the makers of bulk vitamins agreed to pay more than $1.5 billion to settle the allegations.

Soon after, experts say, the Chinese gained a dominant share in the global vitamin C market, and after several big European producers exited the business, the Chinese companies began raising prices.

By 2001, the Chinese companies were acting like a cartel and fixing the price of vitamin C, according to the American lawyers representing buyers of vitamin C in the New York case.

Lawyers representing the Chinese companies could not be reached early Friday. And one of the Chinese companies involved in the case, Hebei Welcome Pharmaceutical, said by telephone Friday that it did not yet have a statement to release.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/business/global/us-fines-chinese-vitamin-c-makers.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Samsung Ends Bid for European Sales Ban on Apple Products

Samsung, the South Korean electronics giant, had been seeking injunctions in several countries, including Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, contending that Apple, Samsung’s biggest rival in the smartphone market, had infringed Samsung patents.

The move came only a day after a ruling in a related case in San Francisco, where a Federal District Court judge rejected a request by Apple, which is based in California, for an injunction to block sales of certain Samsung devices. The decision followed a previous jury ruling that Samsung had violated Apple patents.

After the latest twist in the European case, Samsung said it had acted “in the interest of protecting consumer choice.” Analysts said other factors might have been in play, including a possible nudge from the European Commission.

In January, the commission opened a formal antitrust investigation into Samsung’s licensing terms for patents covering wireless technologies. Under a previous agreement, Samsung had pledged to make the patents available to competitors on “fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory” terms.

“The scope of what was withdrawn precisely matches the area in which the European Commission has been investigating,” said Florian Müller, a patent consultant in Germering, Germany. “It’s not just that the plot is thickening; in my view, there can be no other plausible view than that there is pressure from Brussels.”

The commission previously said that it was concerned about possible abuse of patents like the ones at issue in the Apple-Samsung injunction request, which cover technologies needed for a device to function. Without some of these “standard essential patents” from Samsung, for example, phones cannot connect to high-speed wireless networks.

“Regulators have been saying, if the patent holders try to abuse these patents, then they are going to get in trouble,” Mr. Müller said.

The commission declined to comment directly on whether there might be a link between Samsung’s announcement on Tuesday and the antitrust case in Brussels. “We take note of this development,” said Antoine Colombani, the spokesman for the European competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia. “Our investigation is ongoing.”

Samsung said that it could not comment on the proceedings but that it was “fully cooperating with the European Commission.”

“Samsung remains committed to licensing our technologies on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms, and we strongly believe it is better when companies compete fairly in the marketplace, rather than in court,” it said in a statement.

There has been speculation that Samsung and Apple have been in talks to reach a settlement, though the broad scale of the litigation between the two companies, with lawsuits seeking sales bans or damages continuing on several continents, could make that challenging.

“We cannot comment on details of ongoing legal proceedings, but we believe a commercial resolution is achievable,” Samsung said in a statement.

Alan Hely, a spokesman for Apple, declined to comment.

The announcement by Samsung did not end litigation between the two companies in Europe. Samsung said it planned to pursue lawsuits seeking damages from Apple for what it contends is patent infringement.

Apple and Samsung have also been battling over other patents, covering nonessential features of their devices, like design.

Apple, too, has previously secured bans on the sale of certain Samsung products. Last year, for example, a court in Düsseldorf ruled that Samsung could not sell one of its Galaxy tablet devices in Germany because it bore too close a resemblance to the iPad 2 from Apple.

While some analysts cited regulatory pressure as a possible reason for Samsung’s decision on Tuesday, others said the company might have decided that the lawsuits were simply a distraction. Samsung’s phones, especially its Galaxy S3, have been selling well.

In the third quarter, the S3 surpassed the iPhone 4S to become the world’s best-selling smartphone, according to Strategy Analytics, a research firm.

“Maybe the market was telling them that they were succeeding and their time was better spent promoting sales of their product,” said Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research.

James Kanter contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/technology/19iht-samsung19.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

DealBook: Fugitive Moody’s Analyst Ordered to Pay $35 Million to S.E.C.

Of the 26 defendants criminally charged in the government’s insider trading investigation centered on Raj Rajaratnam, the hedge fund billionaire, only one has not been convicted or pleaded guilty: Deep Shah.

Mr. Shah, a former bond analyst at Moody’s Investors Service, has been declared a fugitive and is believed to be in Mumbai.

On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered Mr. Shah to pay the government $34.6 million related to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s insider trading lawsuit against him.

Federal authorities have accused Mr. Shah of leaking the news of two impending private equity takeovers to hedge fund traders: Hellman Friedman’s acquisition of the software company Kronos and the Blackstone Group’s purchase of Hilton Hotels. As a Moody’s analyst, Mr. Shah would get advance word of the deals so the ratings agency could update its analysis of the company’s debt.

On Tuesday, a Federal District Court judge, Jed S. Rakoff, signed a judgment that ordered Mr. Shah to pay a $24.6 million civil fines, $1.76 million of interest and forfeit $8.2 million of illegal profits. But unless the authorities can track Mr. Shah down, it will be difficult for the government to recover this money.

Mr. Shah, who is in his late 20’s, was involved in an insider trading ring led by Zvi Goffer, a former Galleon employee. A jury convicted him, his brother, Emanuel Goffer, and another hedge fund trader of earning more than $20 million in illegal profits by trading on illegal tips about upcoming mergers and acquisitions. Some of those tips came from Mr. Shah, the government says.

He is also accused of leaking the Hilton deal to Roomy Khan, a former Intel executive, who in turned passed them on to Mr. Rajaratnam. A jury found Mr. Rajaratnam guilty in May of insider trading crimes. His sentencing is set for Sept. 27.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=2fe9a8feee3f7052f3ac962c586e54f0