Category Archives: General Litigation

Customer lists can be one of the more valuable aspects of a business. For businesses that have gone through a bankruptcy, customer lists are often one of the valuable assets sold in order to pay off creditors. The valuable information that these lists provide is what makes them such lucrative assets. They provide consumers’ address and phone numbers and detailed information on their spending habits. While the privacy of this information has been a concern since the dot-com era of the late 1990s and early 2000s, social media developments have upped the privacy concerns, and a group of consumers is suing several smart phone app developers on privacy grounds and data mining. Apps that run on smart phones and social media sites like Facebook have access to a wealth of information about you and your friends (and you usually provide this information voluntarily and publicly). These devices and sites are…
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The e-book business has seen at least a doubling of its sales year after year in recent memory. In 2008, its sales stood at $78 million. Last year, that figure reached $1.7 billion, and some analysts in the industry expect 2012 sales to reach over $3.5 billion. Although the popularity of e-books continues to spread, a common complaint you often hear is, “why do e-books cost so much?” Since e-books do not require paper, binding or shipping like traditional books, it shocks some newcomers to the e-book world that e-books may cost as much as traditional books. There might be something to this complaint after all. Last week the Justice Department warned Apple and five major publishers (including Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and HarperCollins) that the Department was planning to sue them for colluding to raise the prices of e-books. Investigators both here and in Europe suspect that these companies…
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In the late 1990s we all fell in love with the tech industry a little too much. The “dot-com bubble” introduced the country to the power of computers and internet access, as we learned to shop, research and conduct financial transactions from the comfort of our homes. Nearly any company with a “.com” after its name saw its stock soar, but, by 2000 and 2001, many of those companies were out of business and the stock markets, particularly the NASDAQ, saw a combined loss of trillions of dollars in market value. Have we already forgotten the dot-com bubble?  Are we ready to jump head first into the social media bubble? Continuing a trend that began last year, 2012 will see a number of high profile initial public offerings (“IPOs”) in the tech sector. Over the past year, there were 37 tech IPOs. In the coming year, we are set to…
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