A California federal judge has refused to dismiss a lawsuit accusing X, the social media service formerly called Twitter, of disproportionately laying off older workers when Elon Musk acquired the company last year.
US District Judge Susan Illston on Tuesday said the plaintiff in the proposed class action, John Zeman, had provided enough evidence that the mass layoffs had a greater impact on older employees to continue pursuing the case.
Zeman, for example, claims that X laid off 60 percent of workers who were 50 or older and nearly three-quarters of those who were over 60, compared with 54 percent of employees younger than 50.
Illston ruled that the federal law banning workplace age bias allows plaintiffs to bring so-called “disparate impact” claims in a class action, an issue that has divided courts.
The judge dismissed a claim that X intentionally targeted older workers for layoffs, but gave Zeman a month to file an amended lawsuit fleshing out that claim.
Shannon Liss-Riordan, Zeman’s lawyer, said “this decision validates the arguments we are making that the discrimination claims can go forward.”
X did not respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit is one of about a dozen X is facing stemming from Musk’s decision to lay off about half of Twitter’s workforce beginning last November.
Those cases include various claims, including that X laid off employees and contractors without the required advance notice and that Musk forced out workers with disabilities by refusing to allow remote work and calling on employees to be more “hardcore.”
At least two lawsuits claim the company owes ex-employees at least $500 million (roughly Rs. 4,100 crore) in severance pay. Twitter has denied wrongdoing in those cases.
Liss-Riordan also represents about 2,000 former Twitter employees who have filed similar legal claims against the company in arbitration.
Is the iQoo Neo 7 Pro the best smartphone you can buy under Rs. 40,000 in India? We discuss the company’s recently launched handset and what it has to offer on the latest episode of Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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Two US authors sued OpenAI in San Francisco federal court on Wednesday, claiming in a proposed class action that the company misused their works to “train” its popular generative artificial-intelligence system ChatGPT.
Massachusetts-based writers Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad said ChatGPT mined data copied from thousands of books without permission, infringing the authors’ copyrights.
Matthew Butterick, an attorney for the authors, declined to comment. Representatives for OpenAI, a private company backed by Microsoft, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Several legal challenges have been filed over material used to train cutting-edge AI systems. Plaintiffs include source-code owners against OpenAI and Microsoft’s GitHub, and visual artists against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt.
The lawsuit targets have argued that their systems make fair use of copyrighted work.
ChatGPT responds to users’ text prompts in a conversational way. It became the fastest-growing consumer application in history earlier this year, reaching 100 million active users in January only two months after it was launched.
ChatGPT and other generative AI systems create content using large amounts of data scraped from the internet. Tremblay and Awad’s lawsuit said books are a “key ingredient” because they offer the “best examples of high-quality longform writing.”
The complaint estimated that OpenAI’s training data incorporated over 300,000 books, including from illegal “shadow libraries” that offer copyrighted books without permission.
Awad is known for novels including ’13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl’ and ‘Bunny’. Tremblay’s novels include ‘The Cabin at the End of the World’, which was adapted in the M. Night Shyamalan film ‘Knock at the Cabin’ released in February.
Tremblay and Awad said ChatGPT could generate “very accurate” summaries of their books, indicating that they appeared in its database.
The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount of money damages on behalf of a nationwide class of copyright owners whose works OpenAI allegedly misused.
Apple unveiled its first mixed reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro, at its annual developer conference, along with new Mac models and upcoming software updates. We discuss all the most important announcements made by the company at WWDC 2023 on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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Computer-memory company Netlist convinced a federal jury in Texas on Friday to award it more than $303 million (roughly Rs. 2,500 crore) for Samsung Electronics‘s infringement of several patents related to improvements in data processing.
The jury in Marshall, Texas determined after a six-day trial that Samsung’s “memory modules” for high-performance computing willfully infringed all five patents that Netlist accused the Korean tech giant of violating.
Representatives for the companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Netlist stock was up 21 percent following the verdict on Friday afternoon.
Irvine, California-based Netlist sued Samsung in 2021, alleging Samsung memory products used in cloud-computing servers and other data-intensive technology infringe its patents. Netlist said its innovations increase the power efficiency of memory modules and allow users to “derive useful information from vast amounts of data in a shorter period of time.”
A Netlist attorney told the jury that Samsung took its patented module technology after the companies had collaborated on another project, according to a court transcript.
Netlist had asked the jury for $404 million (roughly Rs. 3,300 crore) in damages.
Samsung had argued that the patents were invalid and that its technology worked in a different way than Netlist’s inventions.
The case is Netlist v. Samsung Electronics, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, No. 2:21-cv-00463.
In another news, it was reported that Samsung Electronics was considering replacing Google with Microsoft-owned Bing as the default search engine on its devices. The report, published by the New York Times over the weekend, underscores the growing challenges Google’s $162-billion (roughly Rs. 13,29,477 crore) a-year search engine business face from Bing — a minor player that has risen in prominence recently after the integration of the artificial intelligence tech behind ChatGPT.
Xiaomi launched its camera focussed flagship Xiaomi 13 Ultra smartphone, while Apple opened it’s first stores in India this week. We discuss these developments, as well as other reports on smartphone-related rumours and more on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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The Viewdid not hold back today when it came to Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting’s recently filed lawsuit against Paramount Pictures. The stars of Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo & Juliet film are accusing the studio of child abuse and harassment for a nude scene they filmed in the movie, but according to some seated around the Hot Topics table, the $500 million lawsuit looks like a “money grab.”
The debate began after Whoopi Goldberg explained that the two actors, who are now in their 70s but were in their teens while filming, are suing the movie studio after claiming the late director pressured them to get nude and lied about the positioning of cameras, telling them they would be discreetly filmed.
“Well, it looks like a money grab because it’s such a long time ago,” Joy Behar said of the suit, but softened her analysis, aruging that there should be no statute of limitations because some people “don’t even come to the conclusion that there was abuse sometimes for years.”
Meanwhile, Sunny Hostin, who said she worked closely with child abuse victims as a prosecutor, believes the lawsuit “sort of dilutes the definition of child sex abuse.”
Referencing Hussey’s 2018 interview with Varietyin which she defended the nude scene — telling the outlet, “Nobody my age had done that before. It was needed for the film” — Hostin said the actress’ previous statements “make this a very difficult case to prove” and that “it feels disingenuous to me at this point.”
Goldberg went on to advise that the two actors go after Zeffirelli’s estate since the people currently in power at Paramount “had nothing to do with making that movie then.” The moderator also admitted that she doesn’t quite see anything wrong with the final product of the film.
“As a kid who loved that movie, who fell in love with Shakespeare because of that movie, it never occurred to me that there was something wrong because it didn’t look dirty,” she said. “It looked like two kids trying to figure out who each other is.”
No matter who wins this lawsuit, fans will likely lose.
Two dozen Knicks and Rangers season ticket holders — self described “resellers” who glom up tickets and then sell them on StubHub and secondary markets at inflated prices — accuse Madison Square Garden of cutting them off to increase its own profits, according to a Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit.
The plaintiffs, mostly tri-state area residents and one Israeli, say MSG for years willingly sold them ducats, but now that the Rangers are “a perennial playoff contender” and the Knicks “relevant” again, the Garden wants its tickets back.
The Sept. 7 filing has fueled an epic battle between the plaintiffs’ attorneys and MSG. On Friday, the Post reported that nearly 60 lawyers at the commercial law and government relations firm of Davidoff Hutcher & Citron have been banned from Rangers and Knicks games because their clients are suing MSG, new court papers allege.
The plaintiffs said the Knicks are finally “relevant” again.for the NY POST
In the September case, the scorned scalpers contend “MSG’s end game is to reclaim the tickets, create a monopoly, and reap a windfall by selling the tickets exclusively through its own ‘authorized’ out-of-state reseller,” the Sept. 7 filing says. Currently, face-value tickets can only be purchased directly from Ticketmaster or the Garden’s box office.
“After many years of relying on [the local resellers] to purchase Knicks and Rangers season tickets at exorbitant prices when the teams respective performance and records were abysmal, MSG has in utter bad faith elected to not renew” their season tickets, the suit says.
The 21-page complaint paints the scalpers in a noble light.
Now, face-value tickets can only be purchased from Ticketmaster or the Garden’s box office.AP
“For years plaintiffs have been loyal to MSG through playoff droughts, postseason failures, coaching musical chairs, and constant disruptive sideshows. During that same time period, it was MSG who actively solicited plaintiffs’ business, including through the COVID-19 pandemic,” the suits says.
An MSG spokesman countered, “We want our season ticket memberships to be made up of our loyal Knicks and Rangers fans, not professional ticket brokers. This lawsuit is without merit, and we maintain the right to not offer season tickets.”
In the latest salvo, the legal eagles allege MSG declared the historic arena was “banning” the firm’s “attorneys from entering venues owned and operated” by MSG, according to a Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit from Thursday.
It came as a surprise to most of the firm’s team who aren’t involved in the legal brawl with MSG, and who now find themselves “pariahs,” the Thursday filing claims. The suit is asking for an emergency order from a judge to reinstate firm co-founder and managing partner Larry Hutcher’s season tickets and overturn the ban against the firm.
Either way, there is no free lunch for Rangers or Knicks fans.
The plaintiffs also allege that the Rangers are “a perennial playoff contender.”Charles Wenzelberg / New York Po
A center-ice seat for the Rangers-Tampa Bay Lightning opening-night game on Oct. 11 ran $1,100 if you purchased through MSG-partner Ticketmaster, but upwards of $2,000 on the secondary market. A ticket near the floor at the Knicks’ opening game Oct. 21 vs. the Detroit Pistons will cost you $1,991 if you buy on the secondary market, and $490 through Ticketmaster, according to recent listings.
The Garden’s actions restrict the “existing free market” and will drive up ticket prices, the scalpers claim.
“There is no doubt that the average ticket buyer would be benefited by our success in the lawsuit because it will establish a real market place for the tickets,” said Hutcher, the attorney for the ticket brokers who is now in crosshairs of the latest litigation.
At least one sports junkie wasn’t buying either side’s spiel in the original dispute.
“It’s a lose-lose situation for the fans,” said diehard Knicks follower Michael Alcazar, 55. “It’s hard for me to feel sorry for the [resellers]. In the end, I’m still paying a high mark-up for the tickets and the Garden prices are exorbitant too,” the Queens-bred criminal justice professor said.
The vintage, one-of-a-kind jewels jacked from a Brink’s armored truck in California were supposed to be worth a paltry $8.7 million — not the whopping $150 million the gem owners claimed after the theft.
Brink’s contends multiple jewel companies undervalued the gems ripped off last month on its watch during the “Ocean’s 11” style heist, according to a Manhattan Federal Court lawsuit.
Brink’s insists it’s not liable for the hefty losses now being claimed by the jewelers.
Brink’s Global Services USA, Inc. is suing 13 jewelry vendors for breach of contract, claiming they put a much different value for the goods on the merchandise manifest, according to the Aug. 4 filing.
“Providing a declared value significantly below the actual value of the shipment, without the written consent of Brink’s, constitutes fraud against Brink’s and may constitute insurance fraud,” according to court papers.
The company wants a judge to declare that it’s not responsible for the sky high $150 million valuation used by the jewelers, but instead is only liable for the lower amount.
Thieves had gotten away with a grand heist of pricey jewelry in Frazier Park, California on July 11, 2022.Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty ImagesJewelry vendors insist approximately $150 million in goods were snatched.Intergem.com
In all, 22 bags of jewels were stolen from the back of the truck July 11 as it drove from one industry convention in San Mateo to another in Pasadena, authorities and vendors said. The FBI is investigating.
The truck left San Mateo at midnight and shortly after 2 a.m., the armed guards hit a rest stop in Frazier Park, Calif., where one went in for food and the other guard stayed behind and got some sleep, Brink’s said in court papers.
About 30 minutes later the guard returned to find “the red plastic seal around the trailer was cut and lying on the ground,” and found the rear lock cut away, Brink’s said in the legal filing. The dozing armed guard told his partner he “did not see or hear anything unusual” and the duo called the cops.
Brink’s is accused jewelry vendors of committing insurance fraud.Intergem.comTwo armed guards stopped to rest in Frazier Park, California when the thieves approached the vehicle.Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images
Brandy Swanson, the director of the San Mateo jewelry show, previously said the jewelers robbed of their gems had lost more than $100 million in the theft. Vendors claimed the figure was as high as $150 million.
Swanson noted it was her experience that jewelry owners tend to underestimate their pricey inventory when it comes to insurance, to keep costs low.
“That’s where the discrepancy comes in,” she said.
Approximately 25 to 30 bags full of jewelry were robbed from the Brink’s truck.Getty ImagesThe expensive cargo was on its way to showcase at the Pasadena Convention Center northeast of Los Angeles before it was stolen.Getty Images/iStockphoto
A Black former elevator operator at Tesla’s flagship California assembly plant on Tuesday rejected a $15 million (nearly Rs. 120 crore) award in his lawsuit alleging racial abuse by coworkers, opening the door for a new trial after a judge slashed a $137 million (nearly Rs. 1,100 crore) jury verdict.
Lawyers for Owen Diaz, who had sued Tesla in 2017, turned down the judge’s award in a brief filing in federal court in San Francisco. They said in a statement that the award was unjust and would not deter future misconduct by Tesla.
“In rejecting the court’s excessive reduction by asking for a new trial, Mr. Diaz is again asking a jury of his peers to evaluate what Tesla did to him and to provide just compensation for the torrent of racist slurs that was directed at him,” his lawyers said.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
US District Judge William Orrick lowered the jury award, which was one of the largest of its kind in a discrimination lawsuit, to $15 million in April. He had also denied Tesla’s motion for a new trial, conditioned on Diaz’s acceptance of the lower award.
Earlier this month, the judge denied Diaz’s motion for permission to appeal that ruling and gave him two weeks to accept the lower award or agree to a new trial.
Tesla is facing a series of lawsuits involving alleged widespread race discrimination and sexual harassment at its Fremont, California factory, including one by a California civil rights agency.
Last week, a Tesla shareholder filed a lawsuit accusing the company’s chief executive, Elon Musk, and board of directors of neglecting worker complaints and fostering a toxic workplace culture.
Tesla has denied wrongdoing and says it has policies in place to prevent and address workplace misconduct.
Diaz alleged that his colleagues and a supervisor subjected him to a hostile work environment that included slurs, caricatures and swastikas in his nine months working at the Fremont plant in 2015 and 2016.
A jury had awarded Diaz $6.9 million (nearly Rs. 50 crore) of compensatory damages and $130 million of punitive damages last October, but Orrick in April said those numbers were excessive.
Diaz’s lawyers in their statement on Tuesday said Orrick’s decision highlighted systemic bias that federal judges have against juries, which in turn violates the constitutional rights plaintiffs have to a trial by jury.
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