Cambria County, Pennsylvania, wrongly alleges in its complaint that many portions of the telephone facilities and conduit in an easement under Verizon’s control along the Inclined Plane funicular connecting the city of Johnstown to the borough of Westmont are in disrepair (see 2306020001), said Verizon’s memorandum Tuesday (docket 3:23-cv-00108) in U.S. District Court for Western Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh in support of its motion to dismiss. Verizon “is committed to maintaining its facilities along the Inclined Plane and has and will continue to make such repairs as are necessary,” it said. But the county’s “true reason” for bringing its lawsuit is to force Verizon to pay a fair-market rent for its continued use of the easement “for which it has already bargained and provided sufficient consideration, and which remains valid and binding,” it said. All of the county’s “asserted causes of action fail as a matter of law,” it said. Plaintiffs allege in Count I that Verizon breached the subject easement agreement by failing to “maintain” its facilities within the easement. The easement agreement “conveys to Verizon the right -- and not the obligation -- to maintain its facilities,” it said. “Nowhere does the agreement say that Verizon has a duty to make the repairs which could be breached or that an alleged failure negates Verizon’s easement rights as defined in the agreement,” it said. The county “improperly and inexplicably” seeks an award of damages for the nonexistent breach and for the court to rewrite the agreement and order additional payments from Verizon “not originally bargained for and not in any way associated with the purported breach,” it said. The county not only failed to state a claim for breach of contract, but also seeks a form of relief “that fails as a matter of law,” it said.
A California court should decline businesses’ “invitation to thwart the will of the voters by significantly delaying enforcement” of the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), said the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA). The agency opposed a California Chamber of Commerce lawsuit at the California Superior Court in Sacramento (case 2023-80004106-CV). The 12-month grace period sought by CalChamber "would be a windfall to businesses, to the detriment of consumers,” the agency wrote Monday.
All attorneys and pro se litigants appearing before U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr in U.S. District Court for Northern Texas must file, along with their notice of appearance, a certificate attesting 1) that no portion of any filing will be drafted by generative artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, Harvey.AI, or Google Bard, or 2) that any language drafted by generative AI will be checked for accuracy, using print reporters or traditional legal databases, “by a human being,” said Starr Thursday in a notice on the court’s website. AI platforms are “incredibly powerful” and have many uses in law such as for form divorces, discovery requests, suggested errors in documents and anticipated questions at oral argument, Starr said, “but legal briefing is not one of them.” AI platforms in their current states “are prone to hallucinations and bias,” Starr said: "They make stuff up -- even quotes and citations.” He also cited “reliability” and “bias.” Attorneys swear an oath to set aside their personal prejudices, biases, and beliefs to faithfully uphold the law and represent their clients, but generative AI “is the product of programming devised by humans who did not have to swear such an oath,” he said. Artificial intelligence systems “hold no allegiance to any client, the rule of law, or the laws and Constitution of the United States -- or to “the truth,” he said. “Unbound by any sense of duty, honor, or justice, such programs act according to computer code rather than conviction, based on programming rather than principle.” The court will strike any filing from a party who fails to file a certificate on the docket attesting they read the court’s judge-specific requirements and understand they will be held responsible for the contents of any filing they sign and submit to the court, “regardless of whether generative artificial intelligence drafted any portion of that filing.” Any party believing a platform has “the requisite accuracy and reliability for legal briefing" may move for leave and explain why, Starr said.
T-Mobile didn't "owe a duty to prevent third-party crime,” said the carrier Friday in its reply (docket 2:23-cv-00271) in U.S. District Court for Western Washington in Seattle in support of its motion to dismiss a negligence suit over an alleged SIM swap scam (see 2305230019). Plaintiff Eman Bayani alleged in February he lost “thousands of dollars” in a SIM swap after third-party criminals hacked into his online cryptocurrency account and stole his digital currency, said his complaint, alleging violations of the Communications Act and Stored Communications Act. T-Mobile moved to dismiss the case in April, saying Bayani ignored MetroPCS’ warning that it strives to protect customers from cyberattacks but its terms and conditions (T&Cs) say it “cannot guarantee security.” Bayani responded that the T&Cs are “the very definition of a one-sided contract of adhesion, in which T-Mobile attempts to insulate itself from liability in every way possible.” In its Friday reply, T-Mobile said the limitations provision of the contract “goes both ways” and “all claims must be brought within 1 year of the date the claim arises." It said the court should incorporate the T&Cs because courts "routinely incorporate contracts” where the parties’ contractual limitations period bars the claims and where claims “allude to an underlying contractual relationship.” The carrier attached an exhibit showing Bayani opted out of arbitration, but the request was “subject to the Terms & Conditions of your T-Mobile service.” The T&Cs were “the operative agreement when he contracted for Metro service,” it said. T-Mobile also said the terms’ limitation period “bars most of the claims,” citing McKee v. AT&T. Bayani, relying on the T&Cs to avoid arbitration, "neither challenges the authenticity of the T&Cs nor identifies another supposed contract governing his admittedly contractual relationship with Metro," said the reply. "Whether the Court addresses the T&Cs now or later, Mr. Bayani's claims also fail for many independent pleading deficiencies" and should be dismissed with prejudice, it said.
Two more negligence class actions were filed last week against Dish Network in U.S. District Court for Colorado in Denver over the company’s Feb. 23 network outage and resulting data breach.
Emails between Harbinger Capital Partners and Apollo Global Management executives should have raised red flags by 2011 that Harbinger was perhaps being defrauded in its $2 billion investment into SkyTerra Communications and its planned terrestrial/satellite L-band communications network, New York Supreme Court Justice Robert Reed of New York County said last week. As such, Reed ruled Harbinger's 2017 fraud complaint falls outside the statute of limitations for bringing such a complaint. In a series of 2011 emails quoted in the decision, Harbinger Managing Director Philip Falcone repeatedly asks defendant/former SkyTerra CEO Alex Good whether SkyTerra's L-band interference tests had shown notable interference with GPS and whether SkyTerra and its owner, Apollo, had made those test results clear to Harbigner. "Everyone says I should sue you for fraud . ... do I listen to them? I'm trying to find something where the gps issue was disclosed as I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt but there are some nasty bondholders out there," Falcone wrote Oct. 6 of that year. In a Nov. 8 email, Good maintained there were plenty of disclosures to Harbinger's team, and the interference potential was a reason the plaintiffs were able to buy the L-band spectrum rights at a fraction of the cost of other mobile spectrum. Good's insistence there had been proper disclosures to Harbinger "would have prompted a reasonable investor who had lost almost $2 billion, to investigate further," the judge said. The emails "flatly refute" the plaintiffs' allegation there was no reason to believe there was possible fraud by Apollo until 2015, in the two-year statute of limitations for bringing a complaint, Reed said. "The emails render it 'essentially undeniable' that by 2011, circumstances were such as to suggest to a person of ordinary intelligence the probability that he has been defrauded, prompting a duty of inquiry," he said. SkyTerra became part of LightSquared, which is now Ligado.
JMBT Live, owner of the Tilt entertainment platform, “misrepresented” the status of its contracts and negotiations with prospective content partners to investors, said plaintiff Locust Group, a Wyoming-based limited liability firm, in a fraud complaint (docket 1:23-cv-04203) Friday in U.S. District Court for Southern New York in Manhattan.
Walmart said the FTC doesn’t, and can’t, deny the questions the retailer highlighted in its motion to certify for interlocutory appeal the district court’s denial of Walmart’s motion to dismiss the agency’s enforcement action “strike at the heart of the FTC’s legal authority and the proper interpretation of key provisions of the FTC Act.” Walmart filed its reply Thursday (docket 1:22-cv-03372) in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois in Chicago in support of its bid to challenge the constitutionality of the FTC’s litigation powers before the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Plaintiffs EDN Global and its CEO, Jerome Edmondson, are seeking a “do-over,” trying to “plead around” a contract at the heart of a fraud claim against AT&T Global Services, said the defendant in a Friday memorandum (docket 3:23-cv-00355) in support of its amended motion to dismiss in U.S. District Court for Northern Texas in Dallas.
The Delaware Chancery Court granted Block’s motion for dismissal of a breach of fiduciary duty complaint brought by a Block shareholder, the City of Coral Springs (Florida) Police Officers’ Pension Plan, against CEO Jack Dorsey and his board challenging Block’s $306 million buy of Tidal, the music streaming service associated with Jay-Z. During its due diligence, a transaction committee formed by the Block board to consider the proposed Tidal acquisition learned Tidal “was failing financially, losing its major contracts, and facing an ongoing criminal investigation,” said the memorandum opinion (docket 2022-0091) Tuesday written by Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick. The committee also learned Jay-Z personally loaned Tidal $50 million to help the troubled company through its difficulties and that Dorsey, the former Twitter CEO, was the sole Block management member in support of the acquisition, it said. “Despite the obvious problems with the deal, the committee approved the transaction for $306 million,” it said: “It seemed, by all accounts, a terrible business decision.” But under Delaware law, “a board comprised of a majority of disinterested and independent directors is free to make a terrible business decision without any meaningful threat of liability, so long as the directors approve the action in good faith,” said the memorandum opinion.