Legal Action - Case Studies Flashcards
1
Q
RACV vs Unisys
A
- RACV (The Royal Automobile Club of Victoria) sued an IT services company by the name of Unisys over a contract promising to deliver a document and workflow management system designed to access online claims.
- The system was delivered, but had response times of 20-40 seconds instead of a promised 2-4.
- RACV sued Unisys for providing misleading information. They wanted $9 million in damages, but lowered it to $4 million in the process of the case.
2
Q
Microsoft vs Netscape
A
- Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape’s Navigator were 2 browsers competing for market share in 1999.
- Netscape filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft for “anti-competitive conduct”, due to Microsoft’s inclusion of Internet Explorer on the Windows platform.
- This violated the 1995 consent decree, put in place to make competition between software developers such as Microsoft and Netscape more even.
- Netscape was then bought by AOL, and open sourced the code for their planned refresh of Netscape, which became Mozilla
- The code that would become Firefox was the browser part of that the Mozilla suite
3
Q
Google vs National censorship laws
A
- Numerous governments have asked Google to censor content.
- In 2012, Google ruled in favour of more than half the requests they received via court orders and phone calls.
- This did not include China or Iran, who completely blocked the site or one of its subsidiary companies.
- This censorship can often be circumnavigated with VPNs
4
Q
Metallica vs Napster
A
- A 2000 U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California case
- Metallica argued that Napster was enabling users to exchange copyrighted MP3 files.
- Napster was forced to search its system and remove all copyrighted songs by Metallica, and many other artists filed lawsuits after this.
- This was a fairly major blow to P2P sharing.
