Whiskey tango foxtrot

[Yosh]

It was a toss up between here and the hanging around tag.

Any way, I submit for your lunchtime reading pleasure:

When Lawyers Cut Their Clients Out of the Deal

Seems a bit sketchy to me.

[Sigma_Orionis]

There better be a pretty good explanation for this. Hell, the Judge had a few choice things to say.

“They do not get one cent,” Judge Andrew J. Kleinfeld wrote in dissent. “They do not even get an injunction against Facebook doing exactly the same thing to them again.”

In exchange for nothing, the plaintiffs gave up their right to sue Facebook and its partners in a program called Beacon, which automatically, and alarmingly, displayed their purchases and video rentals. The program has been shuttered, but its legal legacy lives on.

“This settlement perverts the class action into a device for depriving victims of remedies for wrongs,” Judge Kleinfeld wrote, “while enriching both the wrongdoers and the lawyers purporting to represent the class.”

emphasis mine.

[geonuc]

Hmmmmm ...

I don't know. A settlement that awards damages not to the plaintiffs but to a charity isn't totally outrageous in a class action given that the per person amount probably would have been miniscule. The point of many class actions is not to compensate the damaged parties for their losses but to stop and deter further unlawful behavior.

But no injunction?

[FZR1KG]

One rule for the rich, another for the poor.
I don't see a problem, its been this way for centuries.

[Sigma_Orionis]

If this was the case in question, at least it clarifies it a bit.

US District Judge Richard Seeborg acknowledged that the $15 payments were relatively small, but said it had not been established that Facebook had "undisputedly violated the law".

He added that the claimants could not prove they were "harmed in any meaningful way".