A New York State Supreme Court said Tuesday that Dell and its financial services arm misled customers.
Judge Joseph Teresi ruled that the world's second-largest PC maker engaged in fraud, false advertising, deceptive business, and abusive debt collection practices. The company was accused by the state of New York of offering no-interest or no-payment financing options for its products while Dell Financial Services would fail to honor them.
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed the suit in May 2007, asking for an injunction against the company's business practices and monetary damages for affected customers.
Further court proceedings will need to be held to determine what those damages will be.
Dell told Reuters it "disagrees" with the ruling. "We are confident that when the proceedings are finally completed, the court will determine that only a relatively small number of customers have been affected," according to the company's statement.
Craigslist.org can't be held liable for discriminatory ads posted on its site, according to a court ruling released Friday.
A group of Chicago lawyers had sued the online classifieds site over real-estate ads that stated discriminatory preferences such as "no minorities" or "no children." The group, the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, argued that such ads are prohibited under the Fair Housing Act and that Craigslist should be held liable for allowing them to be posted on its Web site. Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, likening Craigslist to courier services such as FedEx or UPS, which do not read or screen the messages they deliver. Easterbrook said it would be expensive and problematic for Craigslist to filter messages before they were posted.
The ruling (PDF) is good news for the many Web sites that host public forums, giving them further legal protections against liability claims based on content posted by their users, but is an obvious setback for proponents of fair housing online and off.
It's long been a practice within the software world to refer to terms and conditions of a service or product via URL.
In other words, I might sign a physical contract with Customer X, but the contract points to all sorts of other online "documents" for specifics of training, support services, etc. Savvy attorneys, therefore, require that such "moving targets" be removed, forcing them to be hard-wired into the document.
But now the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit (which covers California, Washington and Oregon) is helping the not-so-savvy, as ComputerWorld reports. You can read the ruling in its entirety here (PDF).
The court said that because a contract is an agreement between two parties, one of the parties cannot change it unless the other party agrees to the change...
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