Civil Suit Against Google, Apple and Others Over Employee-Poaching Ban Can Continue
A U.S. District Judge has ruled that an anti-trust case filed against a number of tech companies can continue, saying "they still have an antitrust claim" according to Bloomberg.
[Judge] Koh didn’t take issue with the allegations about the agreements between individual companies, Joseph Saveri, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in an interview after the hearing. Instead, Koh has questions about “how it ties together,” or claims of an over-arching conspiracy between all the companies, he said.
The case goes back more than 5 years, according to the lawsuit, which alleges that "no solicitation" agreements appeared in 2005 between Apple, Adobe, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm, and Pixar. The agreements prevented companies from contacting employees at other companies who were party to the agreement, though employees were free to apply for jobs at other institutions.
The agreements were investigated in 2010 by the Justice Department. The claims were eventually settled, with the companies agreeing not to form no-solicitation agreements for five years.
The current lawsuit is a class-action civil suit brought by employees who said they were harmed by the anti-competitive actions of the defendant companies.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories, according to the Apple leaker and prototype collector known as "Kosutami." In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Kosutami explained that Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories due to its poor durability. The company may move to another non-leather material for its premium accessories in the future. Kosutami has revealed...
Top Rated Comments
Silly agreement. Anything that fosters cooperation between competitors means consumers lose. (And in this case, workers).
A business lawyer, Barry Barnett, says it better than I could:
http://blawgletter.typepad.com/bbarnett/2010/12/animating-competition-doj-settles-claim-against-lucasfilm-for-noncompete-deal-with-pixar.html
Problem is the contract was illegal and not like you were given a choice. The boilerplate contracts have many things that are abuse of power.
If you want a job you have to sign that contract like that. So you have 2 choices. Be unemployed or sign a contract like that. There are no other choices.
What in the world are you talking about?
There is. It's called competition. You pay your employees enough to keep them from going to the competition. The free market cuts both ways.