Law

Tesla notified a California judge that it had reached a conditional settlement with Rivian, reports Bloomberg, four years after accusing Rivian in a lawsuit of intentionally poaching Tesla employees and stealing trade secrets.

Conditions of the settlement weren’t revealed in the filing, and Tesla expects that a request to dismiss the suit will be filed by December 24th, Bloomberg notes.

The former congressman selected as Trump’s attorney general has come up in connection to a defamation lawsuit filed by one of his friends, as the New York Times reports a hacker has obtained evidence shared among lawyers on the case:

The file of 24 exhibits is said to include sworn testimony by a woman who said that she had sex with Mr. Gaetz in 2017 when she was 17, as well as corroborating testimony by a second woman who said that she witnessed the encounter.

The proposed class action suit alleged Google had illegally profited by not refunding commissions it collected from Google Play gift card scams, according to Reuters.

... U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman said the plaintiff Judy May lost money because scammers induced her to buy gift cards, and failed to show that Google caused her losses or knew it was receiving stolen funds.

Notably, Apple settled a similar lawsuit in January.

America’s mayor, who lost a defamation case and now owes $148 million to poll workers, didn’t turn over his valuables as ordered. Then he showed up to vote in one of them, a Mercedes Benz. Hours later, this filing showed up, citing the reporter’s X post.

It’s for the DA’s lawsuit over his probably illegal $1 million daily voter giveaway — I wonder if he’ll show up.

Singh, now the fourth FTX executive to be sentenced after Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, and Ryan Salame, will receive three years of supervised release.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who has presided over the cases, said that Mr. Singh provided crucial assistance to the government and that he had played a “much more limited” role in the scheme than his colleagues had.

The US Fifth Circuit Appeals Court found that the Tesla CEO’s 2018 tweet questioning why workers attempting to unionize would “give up stock options for nothing” was protected free speech, reports Bloomberg.

The National Labor Relations Board had ordered Tesla to tell Musk to delete the tweet in 2021, months after a judge deemed it to be illegal.

Reuters reports Delta filed a lawsuit Friday over the July 19th crash, blaming CrowdStrike for having “forced untested and faulty updates to its customers, causing more than 8.5 million Microsoft Windows-based computers around the world to crash.”

Delta’s CEO already called out Microsoft and CrowdStrike during a CNBC interview (included below), saying, “When was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?,” while Microsoft said Delta ignored offers to help recover faster.

One of the lawyers suing to block the immensely popular new Federal Trade Commission regulation happens to be the wife of one of the judges sitting on that appeals court. Don’t worry though:

Federal law mandates that judges recuse from cases in which their spouse represents a party, so even if [James] Ho, one of the Fifth Circuit’s thirstiest culture warriors, were assigned to the panel, her involvement is less a five-alarm legal ethics fire than a grim bit of trivia about just how tight-knit the conservative legal movement can be.

(Relatedly, last year, Ian Millhiser at Vox called James Ho “the edgelord of the federal judiciary,” describing him as “a Breitbart comments forum come to life.”)

The ruling was made by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) following a complaint filed in 2018 that said LinkedIn’s tracking ads business violated GDPR.

DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle commented:

“The lawfulness of processing is a fundamental aspect of data protection law and the processing of personal data without an appropriate legal basis is a clear and serious violation of a data subjects’ fundamental right to data protection.”

The attorneys for WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg make that very clear in a legal response to WP Engine’s lawsuit. The response also blames WP Engine for relying on WordPress.org, “a website owned and run by Defendant Matt Mullenweg individually:”

WP Engine, a private equity-backed company, made the unilateral decision, at its own risk, to build a multi-billion dollar business around Mr. Mullenweg’s website. In doing so, WP Engine gambled for the sake of profit that Mr. Mullenweg would continue to maintain open access to his website for free. That was their choice.

Arm has given 60-days notice that it’s canceling the architectural license that lets Qualcomm use Arm IP to design its chips. It’s an escalation of a feud dating back to 2022 after Qualcomm bought Nuvia and failed to negotiate a new license. Qualcomm contends it doesn’t have to.

Here’s Bloomberg:

Qualcomm sells hundreds of millions of processors annually — technology used in the majority of Android smartphones. If the cancellation takes effect, the company might have to stop selling products that account for much of its roughly $39 billion in revenue, or face claims for massive damages.

Oof! But this is a negotiation and the most likely outcome is Qualcomm and Arm reaching a deal — else both companies suffer.