The article is an interesting read.  Let me summarize:  If you have a Sprint phone, law enforcement is able to go to a special Sprint website, enter your phone number, and Sprint will reveal your current location using your cell phone’s GPS.  They did this a whopping 8 million times in a one year period.

I anxiously await the fallout from this revelation.  With little or no oversight, I’m sure this feature has been abused thousands, if not millions of times.  The jealous detective monitoring his girlfriend’s location, the ambitious street cop trolling phone data to link “suspects” to crimes.  It could get messy.

I’m not a Sprint customer, but if I were, I would be long gone.

More: The graduate student who broke the story.

More:  A discussion thread on Reddit.

Found via Josh Blackman and Legal Blog Watch.

It amounts to about $3,000 per hour for one lawyer, more than $2,000 an hour each for 34 other attorneys and $1,000 an hour for administrative work.

…

The lead attorney in the case, Eugene Crew, planned to ask the judge Wednesday for the fees. He told the judge in legal briefs that he deserves about $3,000 for each of his 6,189.6 billable hours, “considering the enormity of this undertaking against the most powerful corporation in America.”

Wow. That’s quite a bit of cash, especially considering the crappy settlement that they worked out:

The deal enables anyone who bought a computer in California to get vouchers worth $5 to $29 per Microsoft product, but only a small fraction of the millions eligible have applied for the money.

Mr. Crew allegedly argues in his memo to the judge that his requested fee is fair “because of the difficulty of maneuvering through the legal system to recover money for consumers.” Yeah, right, Mr. Crew, you’re a real champion of consumers rights. I’m sure that the computing population of California is just exhilirated at the prospect of getting a $5 coupon. You’re a regular Ralph Nader.

Now, I’m the first to concede that a reward of large legal fees is often necessary to ensure that these cases get the attention that they deserve – after all, law firms are private enterprises that need to turn a profit. One of the benefits of our contingency fee system is that it works to ensure that the most important cases get heard, a valid consideration considering how overloaded our courts are. Of course, the system assumes that “important” correleates to “valuable,” and necessarily relies on potential financial return as a proxy to assign values to cases.

It isn’t always true that “important” cases are also “valuable.” In fact, this is the problem that class action suits were created to address – before the advent of class action suits, this exact case against Microsoft would have never been heard by a civil court, as the recovery per individual was so small that it wouldn’t be worth anyone’s time to bring it – not the court, not the consumer, not the attorney. The problem was that large companies had carte blanche to rip off consumers, so long as it wasn’t on a large enough scale to attract the attention of governmental authorities.

Enter the class action – the class action allows an attorney to sue on behalf of a group of consumers, and to collect a fee on the totality of the judgment amount. This arrangement, while it may seem like a windfall for the greedy lawyers, it actually pro-consumer. First, it acts as an incentive for a lawyer to take the case. As I described above, without the class action lawsuit, many, if not most, of these cases would never be heard. The second major benefit to consumers is that the wrongdoing doesn’t continue. For instance, a phone company may be charged in class action with overcharging 1 million customers $1 each. The settlement from that suit will be something like: each consumer gets 66 cents, and the attorney gets $334,000. True, the 66 cents doesn’t benefit the consumer very much. But the stopping of the wrongdoing, the fact that he won’t be overcharged $1 per month for the rest of his life, is where the real benefit comes.

Back to Mr. Crew and his requested fees. From what I can surmise, he is charging 5x his regular rate because of the difficulty of suing a large corporation like Microsoft in a class action. This assumes that suing a large corporation is inherently more difficult than suing a smaller one, presumably because they have a lot of money, and that they spend this money on lawyers, and that going up against more lawyers makes a case more difficult to win. Using this logic, Mr. Crew could make the argument that he needs an “extra” incentive to take the case – i.e. why should he take a risky case for $400/hour when he can just as easily take not-so-risky case for $400? A valid point, if the above assumptions are true. The problem is, the assumptions aren’t true.

Suing Microsoft isn’t any harder than suing any other company with adequate legal representation. In fact, it’s probably easier, given that companies with a ton of cash would prefer to just pay these things off than actually litigate them. A company like Microsoft also has an interest in preserving the value of its name, and therefore doesn’t want it turning up on the news every night in conjunction with words like “illegally,” “price-fix,” and “fraud,” which further increases its incentive to settle.

The best evidence that this extra incentive isn’t necessary may be that lawyers from 35 firms joined the suit. If the case is so hard, so daunting a challenge that the extra incentive of 5 times your regular rate is warranted, then why are so many firms chomping at the bit to throw their hats into the ring?

Additional incentives may be appropriate in some cases, but I can’t for the life of me see how this is one of those cases.

And let’s not forget the crappy settlement here – it’s not even for real money, just a coupon worth a paltry $5-$29, to be used toward the purchase of more Microsoft products. Microsoft Office costs $420. Windows XP also costs $420. Tell me, exactly how does a 1%-7% savings benefit the consumer?

It doesn’t. And Gene Crew and his staff should be paid a rate commensurate with the benefit that they provided. In this case, the regular rate seems appropriate, but with a small twist – it should be paid in the form of Microsoft product vouchers.

Originally published on May 12, 2004 at inthehat.com.

Reading just a very few of these statements leaves me arrestingly uneasy.  One maintained innocence. Another reiterated that his actions were taken in self-defense.  This poor soul was surprised to learn that people were there to witness his execution.

To me, the debate over whether capital punishment is moral or immoral is irrelevant. That some death row convicts have been proven innocent is enough to make anyone queasy.

More: U.S. Executions since 1976

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

Interesting perspective.

Seen here at Reddit.

Seen over on Reddit, where they call it “What we can look forward to if McCain’s net neutrality bill passes.”