Judge Alsop not happy, may sanction them...
Mac Clone Suit Ping!
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
Posted on 05/01/2009 9:48:48 PM PDT by Swordmaker
"Apple has filed a letter brief, redacted, asking the court for an order compelling Psystar to turn over financial documents in discovery and to designate a knowledgeable person to testify as to Psystar's finances. They've been asking for a while, and they did a deposition with the CEO of Psystar, but they tell the judge it didn't work out well, since over 90 times he said he didn't know or couldn't recall even basic things," Groklaw reports.
"The unredacted portions of the letter brief show Apple telling the judge that Psystar's CEO and founder Rudy Pedraza 'would not answer basic questions about Psystar's financials... Mr. Pedraza... stated approximately 90 times during the deposition that he did not know or recall answers to basic questions about Psystar's sales, its general costs and profits, its costs and profits by product line, how it determine it prices and profit margins...,'" Groklaw reports.
"So Apple requests from the court an order compelling Psystar to produce 'financial documents sufficient to determine Psystar's revenues, costs, profits, assets and liabilities.' Apple would also like the order to include making Psystar make available 'a knowledgeable 30(b)(6) designee' for another deposition 'at Psystar's expense' on the topic. And it wants its costs covered for having to redo the deposition as a result of Psystar's 'inordinate failure to produce and testify,'" Groklaw reports.
"Psystar has some documents in particular that Apple wants regarding financial projections that Apple noticed attached to some emails that were turned over in discovery, but Psystar, Apple says, turned the emails over without the attachments. Oops. Send their lawyers to discovery dungeon. Seriously. If you are going to withhold, not that one should, you'd think they'd withhold the entire email, not turn over emails that show there were attachments that are not being turned over too," Groklaw reports.
Find links to the documents in the full article here.
"dizzle" writes for World of Apple, "Basically what this boils down to is an alleged willful and knowing failure of Psystar to produce complete financial information. I personally find this very interesting in light of the issue of the still-unidentified ten 'John Doe' defendants. Apple may be attempting to obtain that information in this parenthetical statement:"
(including investors, lenders or other sources of financial support)
"dizzle" writes, "Taking the above-letter as absolutely true and unbiased for the sake of argument; it certainly appears that Psystar has run afoul of good-faith discovery. Federal Court Judges usually have little tolerance for such tactics. If it is indeed true that Rudy Pedraza either would not, or could not, answer financial information 90 times that would be bad for Psystar. If Rudy doesn’t know, who does? Is he protecting someone?"
Full article here.
In an article just recently posted, "dizzle" reports, "As I had suspected, Judge Alsup didn’t let too much time go by before taking this matter to hand. Within the past few hours, he issued an Order Scheduling a Hearing on the Discovery Disputes to take place on May 5, 2009. He further ordered that Psystar must respond to Apple’s allegations by May 4, 2009."
Full article here.
Judge Alsop not happy, may sanction them...
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
Psystar’s finances are irrelevant to this case. Apple’s finances are much more interesting
No, they aren't. Financial data is always relevant in a civil suit that involves monetary damages. Psystar is going to be handed it's head by the judge for refusing to answer... and that will happen fairly rapidly. Judge Alsop has ordered Psystar to respond forthwith... Monday... with a sanction hearing on Tuesday.
Apple's financials are public knowledge.
It is a standard question in any such case - and if it turns out that a business rival of Apple’s is funding the lawsuit... well, let’s just say it won’t be going well for them.
Judges frown on proxy lawfare.
Yeah who is that proxy behind Los Hermanos Psystar? Fidel Castro? Raul? You would not lay money on any of your jive talk about proxies
Well, you do know about the SCO lawsuitfest, right? Turns out that Microsoft was behind the “Sue Linux Out Of Existence” funding that SCO was getting.
Apple's financials are public knowledge.
Big deal Psystar will comply they have a very good Silicon Valley attorney. They are just screwing with a Steve-less Apple, I would do the same. Los Hermanos Psystar never had any stock options backdated for them. Apple would be much more interesting to peel and core in court in depositions and under oath
You are rooting for a boring and soulless corporation.
Well, you do know about the SCO lawsuitfest, right? Turns out that Microsoft was behind the “Sue Linux Out Of Existence” funding that SCO was getting.
____________________
My bet is that you would not bet on a repeat in this case. MS is not so stupid
I followed SCO vs IBM it was very interesting and I’m glad they lost. I never support such lawyer driven schemes
SCO v. IBM and SCO v. Novell isn’t over yet.
They got some cash from somewhere (some Middle Eastern outfit, apparently friends of Bill) and are appealing the cases. While filing bankruptcy.
And, actually, MS is quite stupid. Or at least their legal department is.
I will never understand how such a rich company ends up with such a worthless legal department. I will also never understand how SCO thought it would be a good idea, even propped up with MicrosoftMoney, to take on IBM’s legal department.
IBM’s legal department is so good, they rent it out to other people as part of their consulting services. Suing them is like sticking multiple parts of your anatomy into a running wood chipper - it’s just a stupid idea.
Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
0bama-—
Malice or stupidity (naivete)
I vote malice
Yes, but most of Bailout Barry’s actions cannot be attributed to stupidity.
Microsoft, on the other hand.... not so much.
You are probably right with Microsoft. They locked up the OS and Office suite pretty much and got business customers (suckers) on an eternal upgrade treadmill. They accumulated a huge cash horde and have blown it here and there on harebrained ventures. Maybe X-Box is their biggest adventure and success
I was surprised that Apple has a cash horde roughly the same size. 20 billion or so? Apple has used it cash much more wisely to get iphones, itunes, ipods off the ground. Great brand name penetration and introduction to the universe of Apple products especially among the young to get brand loyalty for life established.
If I was Apple my next move is a 10.2 netbook for $550 that blows the others out of the water. Windows7 is a serious attempt to corner the netbook OS market and Apple must respond or lose out on brand visibility
I was thinking more along the lines of a hardware manufacturer that wants to put OS X on its systems, but doesn't dare to do it due to the potential liability. Better to back-door fund a small company which doesn't have so much to lose.
That’s why people refer to IBM Legal as the Nazgûl. If you’re a LOTR fan, you’ll understand.
Apple would be much more interesting to peel and core in court in depositions and under oath
You are rooting for a boring and soulless corporation.
The Apple business model is to design and produce - and sell at a premium price - good, and elegantly styled, hardware with substantial added value in its bundled software. Not only in the software delivered with the hardware, but in the software upgrade support after the sale. Even as you shop for a Mac with Leopard, you see and consider the reasonable price previous customers are paying to upgrade from earlier versions of OS X without needing to upgrade their hardware - thereby maintaining the value of their older machines and helping to justify Apple's premium pricing on its new machines.Psystar's "hackintosh" is an effort to subvert that Apple business model by forcing Apple to license OS X to customers of competitors who don't pay Apple's premium-priced hardware, and to do so at the same price that Apple charges customers of its own hardware. Thereby forcing Apple into the Microsoft business model. Which, as we know, is to lowball the cost of ownership of a computer by promoting cheap hardware, then selling expensive and bloated Windows upgrades which then inevitably require hardware upgrades. All the while keeping its customers bound to an OS code base which is crude compared with the UnixTM underlying OS X and even that of the similar, free, Linux.
If, as reported, Microsoft relies on hosting Win XP in a virtual machine to assure Windows 7 backward compatibility, it'll be interesting to see how Win 7 fits in between free Linux on the one hand, and excellent OS X "Snow Leopard" Unix on the other.
Since you bring it u all Corporations appear to be soulless, so who are you rooting for, and why?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.