12 ms·

A year or eighteen months from now look for a settlement in the case. Each of the affected class members will be entitled to a $5 discount on an anti-virus prod

• chime 12y ago
  And through all of this, the Lenovo name will continue to be tarnished. That's where the real damage is.
  • mhurron 12y ago
    In 18 months no one will remember this. Honestly, corporations face basically no repercussions from customers because of doing stupid or outright malicious things.
    • pavs 12y ago
      people who actually cared about the superfish incident will remember this, and thats where it counts and where it will hurt. Everyday joe couldn't care less about superfish.
      • mhurron 12y ago
        Lenovo doesn't care that your individual security minded person had an issue with it, Lenovo cares that their volume purchasers continue to purchase in volume. They weren't impacted and they don't care. There are basically no long term downsides to Lenovo for doing what they did.
        • onli 12y ago
          And you know that how? News articles in the normal media titled "Lenovo spreading Spyware" reach exactly those normal customers, and it is quite possible that this has an effect. And further, those users interested in the stuff are the ones recommending laptops to others. We simply don't know the effect because we know no sale figures, or do we?
      • xorcist 12y ago
        It's a relevant question whether enough people care. The Sony rootkit scandal was (almost) as bad as this, yet it didn't make a dent in their computer sales and the Playstation sold better than ever.
        • tracker1 12y ago
          As someone who hasn't bought a Sony labelled product since the rootkit scandal, not sure how much I agree... they definitely would have gotten far more from me when I've bought a couple large TVs, and two stereo systems since then... I even held out on a Bluray player for a long time (I didn't buy sony labelled at least). Though it's akin to avoiding Bank America Corp in practice, they have their hands in every pot.
        • JupiterMoon 12y ago
          Any yet their e-reader business failed. And they don't seem to have done so well on mp3 players (they were big money for other companies a few years ago). Their phone sales are weak compared to other companies with a similar product. The thing these companies miss is that non-tech people ask their tech friends/family before purchasing new things... So piss off a few 100,000 of the techy people and that can translate over the next few years to millions of lost sales.
    • e40 12y ago
      Absolutely not true. I control purchasing for my company, and have caused to be purchased a bunch of Lenovo's. No more, though.
      • charlieflowers 12y ago
        What will you switch to? I lost faith in almost all other laptop manufacturers due to poor quality.
        • chucksmash 12y ago
          I bought a Dell Precision M3800 for personal use a few weeks ago. It's available without a Windows license which was a plus (I live in Ubuntu-land). Only drawbacks so far have been a) the available Linux drivers for the Broadcom wireless seem a bit wonky and b) a lot of apps have issues with the high DPI display.
        • e40 12y ago
          Macbook Pros and run Windows in a VM (VMware). With the SSDs on my Mac, it's literally faster than the beefy machine with spinning disks I had running Windows 7. With Mac's Spaces, I can switch to another screen running Windows with Control-Rightarrow (using a non-Mac keyboard here). It's really seemless and I've never found a single drawback to it.
        • julianz 12y ago
          I've got a Dell e7440 which is a really nice compromise between portability and power. It's built out of something metal and has survived me taking it everywhere so far. 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD and an i7 does the job.
      • pekk 12y ago
        I will continue to order as many Lenovo machines as I need. It is more important to me that the vendor serves my needs than what HN thinks about them. I'm not buying something crappy for my purposes because HN is mad.
        • 12y ago
    • CWuestefeld 12y ago
      Sony's been on my "do not buy" list since the rootkit debacle. They're missing out on sales of video games, cameras, and other consumer electronics (not to mention music and movies) for their misbehavior. And I know I'm not the only one who remembers.
      • JupiterMoon 12y ago
        You are not the only one.
      • uxp 12y ago
        That's good for you, and I fully support your decision, but I wish to posit an argument about Sony and their numerous "debacles" over the past decade starting from the CD Rootkit. Do you remember when Sony went after GeoHot, George Hotz, and fail0verflow for his and their reverse engineering of the PS3 and the outrage and virtual pitchforks that were raised with others touting that they too would never purchase a SCEA/SCEI product again? Remember even more outrage that was raised after PSN went down and it was revealed just how incompetent their internal network security was and how they allegedly stored unencrypted user information and used significantly insecure and broken cryptographic hashing algorithms? In both instances, people said that they were done with Sony. Yet, the Xbox One has had significantly less adoption than the Sony PS4. Please note, I'm not going to argue that the people that said that they were no longer purchasing Sony products are the very same people that bought a PS4 over an Xbox One, but I am arguing that these people had a minuscule to nonexistent effect on the overall repercussions against Sony as to not matter. Searching for "Xbox One PS4 Sales" brings up hundreds of articles ranging from just after launch up to this very day with month-by-month numbers landing from a 1.4 million unit difference in January of 2014, to a 1.7 million difference between the PS4 and Xbox One in the second quarter of 2014, and estimates at that time of 9 million PS4s sold globally versus 5 million for the Xbox One. An article from October of 2014 pegs the PS4 at a 40% lead over the Xbox One. This is a significant difference. Apparently, no one else cares how draconian or insecure a company treats their data, because only a few people remember the short term disasters over the long term entertainment value they receive from the products produced by these companies.
        • 12y ago
• Kurtz79 12y ago
  Law triumphs again! (as in "Lawyers") Still, it's better for this to be in the open, with all the bad PR associated to it, so that companies will think about it twice before pulling similar stunts in the future.
  • pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    >so that companies will think about it twice before pulling similar stunts in the future // Is that how it will pan out though. I'd imagine it's more likely to be that Lenovo get away with paying a little of their profits out in the class action but still overall profit from the whole deal. Then companies will be encouraged to do so long as when they factor in the cost of the lawsuit they still come out on top. IMO penalties should be such that a company doing this sort of thing makes no profit and is at a very real risk of having to be liquidated if they already weren't making a profit. For large companies the payout should be measured in $100 millions as that's the only sort of level of fine that will be noticed. Directors in charge of that section that authorised or actioned the activity should be barred from being directors again and where appropriate face criminal charges. In Lenovos case if they can ever afford to do this again and if the controlling elements (or those who should have exercised control according to the org chart) aren't prosecuted under eg CFAA then the punishment will be too small.
• cynoclast 12y ago
  The only people who win class action lawsuits are lawyers.
  • lamuerteflaca 12y ago
    Not true. The customer will see the company getting punished which is worth a lot more. They will think twice about doing something idiotic next time. This is what I call using your lawyer powers for good (and profit).
    • javajosh 12y ago
      The analogy is getting your car stolen and telling the police, who find the car, keep it for their effort, and let you keep (one of) the floor-mats. You are saying that this is fair because the thief ended up in jail.
      • daurnimator 12y ago
        Better than nothing.... The main point is that it makes a clear punishment for the company; so that others think before doing it themselves. If the cost of loosing the case is high enough, all manufacturers will learn to be cautious about including 3rd party software on their laptops.
      • spacemanmatt 12y ago
        Given the choice between letting the thief have it and splitting it 90-10 with the cops, I am likely to spite the thief. In reality, they have shot my dog while collecting the initial report.
• rayiner 12y ago
  Probably, although I'll note that cy pres awards are under intense scrutiny these days in the various Courts of Appeal. Besides that, is the result unfair here? Did the average claimant even suffer $5 in economic losses?
  • bradleyjg 12y ago
    I know that outright cy pres settlements are on the outs, but are residual cy pres clauses also under the same scrutiny? If so, change that clause to the company keeps whatever is left in the compensation pool. As for unfairness, I think the entrepreneurial class action system to punish very diffuse harms amounts to an inefficient regulatory regime and that inefficiency results in higher prices for everyone as compared to a more efficient system.
    • rayiner 12y ago
      Is there a more efficient system? That's not a rhetorical question. Especially for cases like these where actual damages are either speculative or small enough that they wouldn't ring the bell of government prosecutors. I think a compelling answer is: do nothing, let the reputation economy handle the situation. But the reputation economy works on information, and litigation generates a lot of very good (vetted and authenticated) information. Re: cy pres awards, while Pearson v. NBTY (out of the 7th Circuit) did not involve a residual award, it did strongly imply that they would be unreasonable when, as here, the class members could be individually identified and compensated directly. More generally, after the 7th Circuit's recent cases on the subject, cy pres awards are low hanging fruit for objectors and plaintiffs' counsel have an incentive to structure settlements to avoid such challenges.
      • bradleyjg 12y ago
        Thank you for the reply. Without writing an entire law review article in the comments, I'd say if no government (state or federal) can be bothered, given that they could almost certainly get a fine for less than $4 million (that's a lot of GS-11 man-hours) then reliance on the reputation economy seems like a good alternative. And while discovery can be useful for getting information, in this case the information was publicized based on the workings of a different reputation economy (the security research community). There may be some case that slip through the cracks, but I am unconvinced that the sui generis (to the US) opt-out class action mass tort system does more good than harm.
• btilly 12y ago
  This is true, but do you know why it happens? The US has a protection against double jeopardy. If you've been sued once for something, you cannot be sued again (and again, and again) for the same thing. In most cases this is a good thing. It means that once the case is done, it is really done. But companies have learned how to take advantage of it. If they think they are going to have to fight a class action lawsuit that they are likely to lose, THE COMPANY will go to some lawyers, and say, "If you bring this lawsuit against us, we will cooperate fully, cave in quickly, and we'll settle on modest terms." Said lawyers have every incentive to cooperate. It is easy money, and the more reliable they are about following through, the more of this kind of work they can get. And companies have every incentive to do this. Because occasionally class action lawsuits happen that the company did not set up like this. That's when you get huge claims like the ones that took down big tobacco, or the hot coffee lawsuit that McDonalds faced a few years back.
  • smeyer 12y ago
    >If you've been sued once for something, you cannot be sued again (and again, and again) Double jeopardy doesn't prevent someone from opting out of a class action lawsuit and suing separately. >hot coffee lawsuit The hot coffee case wasn't a class action lawsuit.
    • btilly 12y ago
      Double jeopardy doesn't prevent someone from opting out of a class action lawsuit and suing separately. Yes. But one individual probably does not have sufficient injury to represent a meaningful case for the company. The point is that you've blocked a second, larger, class action lawsuit. Which is what the company is actually scared of. The hot coffee case wasn't a class action lawsuit. You're right. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Interchange_Fee_and_Merchant_Discount_Antitrust_Litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Interchange_Fee_an... for a more meaningful class action lawsuit.
    • thedrbrian 12y ago
      Also the hot coffee lawsuit wasn't as stupid as people make out. The McDonald's coffee really was hot and gave Stella Liebeck some nasty burns.
• jcromartie 12y ago
  Indeed. This needs to be illegal, not inconvenient.
• guelo 12y ago
  Yes the attorneys will get most of the money but it's still A Good Thing™ because Lenovo will pay millions in punitive fees that should serve as a deterrent to them and others.
• downandout 12y ago
  >The class attorneys will be awarded $4 million I think you are drastically underestimating this. $4M likely won't cover the bill for making copies of the discovery. Firms in similarly underwhelming class action cases have received $50M-$100M.