Friday, December 19, 2014
Sony Faces Third Class Action Lawsuit
Earlier this week, we told you that former employees had gotten together to sue Sony in a class-action suit. Since then, two more lawsuits have been filed. This one alleges violation of the California Customer Records Act, violation of the Confidentiality of Medical Information Act, negligence, and violation of the California Unfair Competition law, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The last charge is interesting, because that law applies to false advertising. In essence, the employees are asserting that Sony's delay in confirming the breach to its employees while they knew it was true all along was de facto false advertising. There will surely be many more lawsuits to follow in the wake of the breach.
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Eh, I don't know about that last charge, but then I'm no lawyer. Sony did fuck up by not letting their employees know sooner.
ReplyDelete"we"??? So there are multiple Outties like the multiple Enties?
ReplyDeleteIt's the royal "we".
DeleteSony is in for a bumpy ride. According to the article, the plaintiffs assert that Sony directed their efforts to minimizing the damage from the emails and protecting the movie. I guess the lawyers are suggesting that by not notifying employees of the extent of the breach, Sony was implying that personal employee records were secure.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if Sony Pictures is a autonomous branch of Sony or if corporate Sony is also going to be a part of the action.
Sony/SPE was well aware of their security deficiencies and considered it an acceptable risk, due to the cost of fixing the problems.
ReplyDeleteCertainly a false economy, wasn't it?
I also wonder if Seth Rogen and James Franco will sue. I suspect Rogen as director and writer has a contract that gives him a percentage of the picture. Franco may have had a similar deal. Additionally, there were other writers and another director involved, all of whom may have had a profit share on the movie. By not releasing it or distributing it, it could be said Sony is denying Rogen, et.al. money they should have received.
ReplyDeleteFuck Sony...they deserve it. They should have had a firewall up and running in addition to other network safety protocols in place. If I had worked for or with them and my personal and/or work information was stolen/published worldwide, there would be hell to pay.
ReplyDeleteDolphy, I agree. While they had a steel trap "policy" on security they thought could monitor it themselves and if they had any security software in place it certainly wasn't obvious. Probably because they couldn't make up their minds. They'd been breached through Playstation a few years back and dragged their heels. Just not very smart.
ReplyDeleteIt's very telling that the one of the plaintiffs (Joshua Forster) was a sys admin intern.
ReplyDelete