April 24, 2024

DealBook: Opening Arguments Set for Perelman Trial

Ronald O. Perelman, the chairman of MacAndrews  Forbes, was once one of the country's most successful corporate raiders.Yana Paskova for The New York TimesRonald O. Perelman, the chairman of MacAndrews Forbes, was once one of the country’s most successful corporate raiders.

Opening arguments are set to begin Tuesday afternoon in trial covering the dispute between the billionaire financier Ronald O. Perelman and his former business partner.

Lawyers representing both Mr. Perelman and Donald Drapkin, the former business partner, were in court on Tuesday morning to settle some last-minute issues and select a jury for the trial, which is expected to last roughly five days. The two men are in court fighting over whether Mr. Drapkin violated a separation agreement he signed in 2007 when he left MacAndrews Forbes, Mr. Perelman’s company.

The dispute has created a lot of buzz on Wall Street, in large part because Mr. Drapkin and Mr. Perelman are haggling over roughly $20 million. While the sum is hefty by most standards, it’s not a big amount for the likes of Mr. Perelman, who is estimated to worth more than $12 billion. Mr. Drapkin’s net worth is not known but he too is very wealthy and now runs a Wall Street hedge fund.

Tuesday morning, the love life of Mr. Perelman — who has been married five times, including once to the actress Ellen Barkin — provided some levity for the 21 prospective jurors, who were questioned by a federal judge, Paul G. Gardephe, for roughly two hours.

“Is this the Ronald Perelman who was married to Ellen Barkin,” one juror asked the judge, eliciting laughter in the courtroom. “I have met him a few times through Ellen when they were together.”

Judge Gardephe asked whether that would prevent the juror from being impartial. “Yes, probably,” the juror responded, laughing. He was immediately excused from the jury pool.

“He is all over the news,” another juror said of Mr. Perelman. Only four jurors had heard of Mr. Perelman – and none had heard of Mr. Drapkin.

Jurors in the case will have to decide whether Mr. Drapkin violated the terms of the separation agreement he signed when he left MacAndrews Forbes. At issue is whether Mr. Drapkin hung on to work product he had agreed to return and whether he tried to persuade a MacAndrews Forbes employee to leave the firm.

Mr. Perelman was not in court Tuesday morning, but he was represented by more than half a dozen lawyers and his public relations chief. Mr. Drapkin, wearing cufflinks and a deep blue tie, was there and was scheduled to testify this afternoon. He was also accompanied by several lawyers.

In the end, an eight-person jury was selected. The judge peppered prospective jurors with questions, including their hobbies, what they did for a living and what publications they liked to read. Three of the prospective jurors said they liked the show “NCIS,” a police drama on CBS. One was a fan of the show “American Greed.”

The jury that will hear the trial includes an unemployed actor, a college professor, a nurse who is a fan of Rachael Ray and a 59-year-old woman getting her associates degree in criminal justice.

Some of the more colorful juror candidates didn’t make the final cut. Juror 22, a bus operator, who was excused, was asked what he did in his spare time. His answer: “drink.”

Another had been at medical school with one of the crucial witnesses in the trial. When asked whether this would compromise her ability to be a juror, she said she wasn’t sure whether she remembered him. “It’s possible he could walk in and I’d recognize who he is and say, ‘Oh, he yelled at me when I was a resident,’ or something,” she said.

At one point the judge made reference to the vast wealth of the two parties involved.

“Both the rich and the poor are entitled to justice in our system,” Judge Gardephe told jurors, asking them not to be influenced by the size of their bank accounts.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=5c65b5b19503ca2cc27ca298219c50f3

Free Speech on Twitter Faces Test

SAN FRANCISCO — What began as seamy gossip about an affair between a famous British soccer player and a reality TV star has quickly become another test over how far the rights to privacy and free speech extend online, where social media operate in countries with vastly different laws.

The soccer player has been granted a so-called super-injunction, a stringent and controversial British legal measure that prevents media outlets from identifying him, reporting on the story or even from revealing the existence of the court order itself.

But tens of thousands of Internet users have flouted the injunction by revealing his name on Twitter, Facebook and online soccer forums, sites that blur the definition of the press and are virtually impossible to police.

Last week, amid growing outrage in Britain over the use of super-injunctions, the athlete obtained a court order in British High Court demanding that Twitter reveal the identities of the anonymous users who had posted the messages. A Twitter spokesman, Matt Graves, said the company could not comment on the court order or how it planned to respond.

Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, said, “It’s really going to the core of Twitter’s service and trying to balance the speech of its users and the fact that countries have different laws and norms about speech.”

And while a debate centering on an athlete’s love life might not seem to be the most pressing example of free speech online, there are broader and more urgent implications, analysts said.

“If you step back, that same sort of protection is really vital to have in place when you’re talking about the individuals involved in a revolution or a social movement like the Arab Spring,” said Thomas R. Burke, a chairman of the media law practice at the firm Davis Wright Tremaine.

In a company blog post in January, Biz Stone, a Twitter founder, and Alex Macgillivray, its general counsel, wrote, “Our position on freedom of expression carries with it a mandate to protect our users’ right to speak freely and preserve their ability to contest having their private information revealed.”

Twitter removes spam and illegal posts, they wrote, but tries to limit those exceptions. It releases information when required by law but notifies users before the disclosures unless it is legally prohibited from doing so.

Because Twitter is based in the United States, it could argue that it abides by the law and that any plaintiff would need to try the case in the United States, legal analysts said. But Twitter is opening a London office, and the rules are more complicated if companies have employees or offices in foreign countries.

Still, Twitter has resisted turning over this type of information in the past. Mr. Macgillivray, when asked about international laws at a conference in March, said, “We tell them, we’re a U.S. company, we have C.D.A. 230 here, and you’re welcome to come and try your hand at suing us here,” referring to the Communications Decency Act, which says Web companies are not liable for what their users post.

There is no question that the Twitter posts about the soccer player would be considered legal in the United States, Internet law experts said, because of the Communications Decency Act and the First Amendment’s protections for anonymous speech. Further, an injunction to prevent this type of information from being exposed would be unheard of in the United States. But the issue gets murkier across borders.

“You would think at this point in the Internet you would have a clear body of law about what laws the Internet is subject to, but that is anything but clear,” Mr. Burke said.

Other American Internet companies have run up against conflicting international laws. When Google opened its search engine in China, it censored results in accordance with Chinese law, and it has faced legal issues in Germany over the use of photographs taken for its Street View maps.

Web sites where users post content grapple with different restrictions. Some companies handle the issue by opening localized sites that sometimes follow different rules. Yelp and eBay, for instance, operate different sites in different countries.

Claire Cain Miller reported from San Francisco and Ravi Somaiya from London.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/technology/23twitter.html?partner=rss&emc=rss