Friday, February 29, 2008

Los pantalones son azules

It seems that lawsuits are being handed out left and right these days. Between Best Buy, Comcast, Microsoft, Britney Spears, and Roger Clemens, lawyers everywhere are rejoicing more than Billy Madison on nudey magazine day.

As if Best Buy hasn’t experienced enough grief lately regarding its Geek Squad technicians getting caught stealing porn from its customers, the consumer electronics retailer is now being sued by a Washington, D.C., woman for $54 million after her laptop went missing. The $54 million seems astronomical for a laptop that was originally purchased for only $1100, but the plaintiff is quick to admit that the number was intended to bring attention to her case and expose Best Buy’s carelessness in not informing her in a timely manner that her laptop, containing her personal data, tax information, and irreplaceable photos, had disappeared. In a time where everyone is concerned about identity theft, Best Buy’s negligence theoretically could put the woman’s identity in danger. Speaking of IDs, if you need a fake one, leave your love ones at home.



Meanwhile, Comcast is facing its own legal issues, after allegations of internet traffic discrimination were brought to the table. Very rarely do you hear about discrimination suits not involving people, but the internet services provider is now facing a class action lawsuit for prioritizing their customer’s internet traffic, giving precedence to web surfing and curbing peer-to-peer file sharing applications.

But no one is being hit harder than Microsoft. On top of the possible $1.4 billion fine that the European Commission is trying to levy against Microsoft for trying to monopolize the Internet market by abusing its dominance of the PC market, the software giant is now facing a class action suit that claims consumers were falsely led into purchasing desktops and laptops that were supposedly “Windows Vista Capable”.



The suit claims that consumers were mislead into purchasing certain products were only powerful enough to run the Vista Home Basic edition which doesn’t contain some of the feature that are highly touted with Vista’s marketing. Unless consumers did their research and understood what each version offered, they didn’t know any better. They were put at the same disadvantage as someone who doesn’t speak Spanish.

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