By IT-Lex Intern Karina Saranovic (LinkedIn)

Recently-discovered internal emails reveal that high-level executives at Apple and Google consented to no-poaching agreements, because they believed such practices would reap mutual financial benefits, stated U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh at a hearing last month.  A no-poaching agreement is one where the parties agree not to hire workers who used to work for each other’s company. These kind of deals are generally prohibited by antitrust laws, which find the agreements to be impermissible limitations on the employees’ freedom of movement. The laws are in place to protect a public policy that favors and allows people to move from job to job.

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By IT-Lex Intern Eric Everson (Twitter)

So like many Lexies, I do my fair share of sifting through the latest techie news and I’m always looking for cool legal-related fare.  While this link has nothing to do with legal technology, it really got me thinking about how much better Technology Assisted Review (TAR …or Computer Assisted Review – CAR) might be if it were voice-command driven.

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By IT-Lex Intern Shannon Allen (Linkedin)

Australian authorities are considering infecting the computers of third parties, with the goal of getting terrorists. You read that correctly. Sounds not unlike the crazy Dutch plan we covered a while back. Lexies may remember our story ‘Dutch Government Reserves Right To Destroy Your Computer‘ wherein “the Dutch ministry of Justice and Security proposed powers for the police to break into computers, install spyware, search computers and destroy data. These powers would extend to computers located outside the Netherlands.” Well, now Australia wants in.

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By IT-Lex Intern Karina Saranovic (LinkedIn)

After media gossip-site FishbowlDC published a string of insulting articles about her, publicist Wendy Gordon last month filed suit against the website, its editor, and one of its writers, claiming defamation and false light portrayal. The complaint [PDF] is well worth a read, as it contains lots of salacious details. The parts that matter, though, are these allegations:

“1. This matter arises from an unprovoked, online smear campaign by Defendants, in which they – week after week for more than a year – knowingly published false, defamatory, malicious, nasty, and tasteless statements about Ms. Gordon, designed to cause and that cause serious harm to her reputation, business, and overall well-being.

2. In so doing, Defendants repeatedly, knowingly, and maliciously portrayed Ms. Gordon in an entirely false light, as a self-promoting, attention-seeking, loose party girl/cougar, constantly on the prowl for considerably younger men for casual, sexual relations”

It just gets worse from there.

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By IT-Lex Intern Shannon Allen (Linkedin)

Earlier this month, the New York Law Journal discussed a proposed expansion to New York’s commercial e-discovery rule, which currently requires parties to “consult with each other at the beginning of a case about the eDiscovery issues they anticipate.” That’s a little wishy-washy, and could do with some more specificity, so let’s see what’s being suggested.

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We’ve said it several times: In Europe, they don’t play around on matters of privacy. That explains why a British regulatory watchdog last week fined Sony a cool £250,000 (almost $400,000) for the 2011 data breach caused by a hack to the Playstation Network infrastructure. Yes, the same incident that, in October, a judge here in the States pretty much let Sony off the hook for.

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By Eric Everson IT-Lex Intern (Twitter)

As a software engineer turned law student, it certainly catches my eye when a computer programmer is charged with a crime, especially when the same programmer just had his federal conviction reversed based on the same transaction. In the case of People v. Aleynikov, this Double Jeopardy question will be facing Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Ronald Zweibel on February 15th.

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By Benjamin R. Dryden (bio)

In civil litigation, eDiscovery disputes hardly ever rise to the level of constitutional importance.  But in the criminal arena, the rules are different.  With good cause, warrants to search computers have been called “the closest things to general warrants we have confronted in the history of the Republic.”  P. Ohm, Massive Hard Drives, General Warrants, and the Power of Magistrate Judges, 97 Va. L. Rev. In Brief 1, 11 (2011).  Thus, a recent decision from the Supreme Court of Vermont concerning the powers of judicial officers to impose ex ante limitations on computer search warrants is significant for both eDiscovery and Fourth Amendment reasons.  In re Appeal of Application for Search Warrant, 2012 VT 102, 2012 Vt. LEXIS 100 (2012).

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Earlier this month, a district court in Texas responded to a rather unusual motion from a defendant by the name of Jason Neff. Because he has two pending felony charges for statutory sodomy and child molestation; a history of threatening and intimidating witnesses; a history of violent behavior; and prior criminal history and fugitive status, he was deemed a flight-risk, and so he’s being detained while facing criminal conspiracy charges.  At the recent hearing, Neff requested the provision of a secure laptop computer, or “Reconsideration of the Motion for Defendant to Have Reasonable Access to Digital Evidence”.

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By IT-Lex Shannon Allen (Linkedin)

Four Romanian nationals are charged in a hacking conspiracy in US District Court in New Hampshire.  The hackers collected customer credit card information from 80,000 Subway (and other retail) customers and made millions of dollars of unauthorized purchases by hacking the restaurant’s point of sale (POS) or checkout computer systems. The 21 page, four count indictment explains that the objective of the conspiracy was:

“to hack into and install software code on merchant victims’ POS systems in order to steal credit card data from those systems, which information was used to make unauthorized charges and/or was sold to others to reap profits for the co-conspirators.”

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