Welcome to "On the 50 Yard Line" The Blog of Stuart L. Pardau, Attorney, Professor and Observer of Political Economy; It’s not just about football.

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

NFL Players Association Files Suit Against Owners Claiming Salary Suppression


From the Complaint:

1. This proceeding arises from a conspiracy. Pursuant to the SSA, the NFL and the Owners explicitly agreed that the 2010 season would not be subject to a salary cap and that they would not engage in any prohibited collusion or circumvention of the SSA. The NFL and the Owners, however, engaged in a secret, recently-revealed collusive andCASE 4:92-cv-00906-DSD-SPMS Document 703 Filed 05/23/12 Page 2 of 20
circumventing agreement, whereby each of the 32 Clubs agreed to suppress player salaries – including by imposing a secret $123 million per-Club salary cap for that uncapped 2010 season.
2. Information about this conspiracy did not come to light until on or about March 12, 2012, when it was revealed in the media that four of the 32 Clubs (Washington Redskins, Dallas Cowboys, Oakland Raiders, and New Orleans Saints) did not fully abide by secret NFL rules to suppress player salaries in 2010. New York Giants Owner John Mara – who is Chair of the NFL Management Council Executive Committee (a.k.a., the CEC) – subsequently confirmed the existence of the conspiracy in his statements to the media regarding penalties imposed by the NFL on those four Clubs. The NFLPA and the players also later learned that, according to internal NFL calculations, those four Clubs did not adhere to the league-wide conspiracy, at least not fully, in exceeding the secret salary cap during the uncapped 2010 season by the following amounts: Redskins: $102,833,047; Cowboys: $52,938,774; Raiders: $41,914,060; Saints: $36,329,770.




https://images.nflplayers.com/mediaResources/files/pdf.pdf

Sunday, May 27, 2012

Don't Be Evil: Google Charged with Deliberately Illegally Harvesting Information from Millions of UK Home Computers


Google is facing an inquiry into claims that it deliberately harvested information from millions of UK home computers.
The Information Commissioner data protection watchdog is expected to examine the work of the internet giant’s Street View cars.
They downloaded emails, text messages, photographs and documents from wi-fi networks as they photographed virtually every British road.
It is two years since Google first admitted stealing fragments of personal data, but claimed it was a ‘mistake’.
Now the full scale of its activities has emerged amid accusations of a cover-up after US regulators found a senior manager was warned as early as 2007 that the information was being captured as its cars trawled the country but did nothing.
Around one in four home networks in the UK is thought to be unsecured – lacking password protection – allowing personal data to be collected. Technology websites and bloggers have suggested that Google harvested the information simply because it was able to do so and would later work out a way to use it to make money.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2150606/Google-deliberately-stole-information-executives-covered-years.html#ixzz1w7Ty3YMI


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2150606/Google-deliberately-stole-information-executives-covered-years.html

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Yahoo! CEO Thompson Ousted for Falsifying Resume

Not a pretty, but probably appropriate outcome.  Would a line manager have suffered the same fate if he or she claimed to have, say a degree in electrical engineering when instead they actually graduated with a degree in Art History. I don't care how talented an engineer they might be, they don't have the darn degree. I have represented management on several of those types of matters and every case it was not even a close decision. End of story. And so it is for Mr. Thompson.

All that said, the subtext of this entire scandal is a bitter proxy fight against an entrenched board and management. In that regard, Thompson is likely a casualty in that broader struggle.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/13/technology/yahoo-ceo-out/index.htm?source=cnn_bin

AutoDialers and Prior Consents That May Apply to New Holders of Numbers

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act forbids advertisers, bill collectors and the like from calling your mobile phone, without your consent, using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice. The issue presented here is that if consent is provided a previous holder of the phone number does that "transfer" to any new holder of the number? If so, that surely leads to some silly results, as Judge Easterbrook pointed out his opinion.


http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/05/11/the-daily-writing-sample-predictive-dialers-and-enchanted-buckets/

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Pepsi Formula Might Be Disclosed


Coca-Cola’s secret formula is famously locked inside a vault in the company’s museum in Atlanta. But a historic Pepsi recipe could see the light of day, depending on how a New York court rules.
Heirs of Richard John Ritchie, credited with reformulating Pepsi-Cola in 1931, filed suit Friday against PepsiCo Inc. in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York for the right to share Mr. Ritchie’s  “extraordinary life story’’ with “historians, collectors, journalists and television and film producers.’’



http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/05/08/pepsis-recipe-heads-to-court/

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Hastings Law School Dean Delivers Some Straight Talk About the State of Legal Education

Law schools need to "reboot" says Dean Frank Wu of Hastings. Looks like Wu is backing up his statements with some action -- Hastings will be accepting 20% fewer students than last year,

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/05/02/hastings-law-school-dean-wants-to-reboot-legal-education/

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Bank of America Directors Fight Back

 B of A directors rejected allegations by unhappy shareholders that their proposed $20 million settlementof litigation over the purchase of Merrill Lynch & Co was made "on the cheap" and was the product of collusion.

http://news.yahoo.com/bank-america-directors-fight-back-over-20-million-153519620--sector.html

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