Suits and Litigation (Civil)

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      U.S. Sues Apple, Accusing It of Maintaining an iPhone Monopoly

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      The lawsuit caps years of regulatory scrutiny of Apple’s wildly popular suite of devices and services, which have fueled its growth into a nearly $3 trillion public company.The Justice Department and 16 state attorneys general filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple on Thursday, the federal government’s most significant challenge to the reach and influence of the company that has put iPhones in the hands of more than a billion people.The government argued that Apple violated antitrust laws by preventing other companies from offering applications that compete with Apple products like its digital wallets, which could diminish the value of the iPhone. Apple’s policies hurt consumers and smaller companies that compete with some of Apple’s services, according to excerpts from the lawsuit released by the government, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.“Each step in Apple’s course of conduct built and reinforced the moat around its smartphone monopoly,” the government said in the lawsuit.The lawsuit caps years of regulatory scrutiny of Apple’s wildly popular suite of devices and services, which have fueled its growth into a nearly $2.75 trillion public company that was for years the most valuable on the planet. It takes direct aim at the iPhone, Apple’s most popular device and most powerful business, and attacks the way the company has turned the billions of smartphones it has sold since 2007 into the centerpiece of its empire.By tightly controlling the user experience on iPhones and other devices, Apple has created what critics call an uneven playing field, where it grants its own products and services access to core features that it denies rivals. Over the years, it has limited finance companies’ access to the phone’s payment chip and Bluetooth trackers from tapping into its location-service feature. It’s also easier for users to connect Apple products, like smartwatches and laptops, to the iPhone than to those made by other manufacturers.The company says this makes its iPhones more secure than other smartphones. But app developers and rival device makers say Apple uses its power to crush competition.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Read the Lawsuit Against Apple

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      Case 2:24-cv-04055 Document 1 Filed 03/21/24 Page 4 of 88 PageID: 4

      across many technologies, products, and services, including super apps, text messaging, smartwatches, and digital wallets, among many others.

      Apple’s conduct also stifles new paradigms that threaten Apple’s smartphone dominance, including the cloud, which could make it easier for users to enjoy high-end functionality on a lower priced smartphone- -or make users device-agnostic altogether. As one Apple manager recently observed, “Imagine buying a [expletive] Android for 25 bux at a garage sale and it works fine…. And you have a solid cloud computing device. Imagine how many cases like that there are.” Simply put, Apple feared the disintermediation of its iPhone platform and undertook a course of conduct that locked in users and developers while protecting its profits.

      Critically, Apple’s anticompetitive conduct not only limits competition in the smartphone market, but also reverberates through the industries that are affected by these restrictions, including financial services, fitness, gaming, social media, news media, entertainment, and more. Unless Apple’s anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct is stopped, it will likely extend and entrench its iPhone monopoly to other markets and parts of the economy. For example, Apple is rapidly expanding its influence and growing its power in the automotive, content creation and entertainment, and financial services industries-and often by doing so in exclusionary ways that further reinforce and deepen the competitive moat around the iPhone.

      This case is about freeing smartphone markets from Apple’s anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct and restoring competition to lower smartphone prices for consumers, reducing fees for developers, and preserving innovation for the future. The United States and the States of New Jersey, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Vermont, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia, acting by and through their respective

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      Family Settles in Battle for Ancestral Land in South Carolina

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      Josephine Wright, who died this year at 94, had been fighting to save family property. The developer, Bailey Point Investments, agreed to end the dispute, the family’s lawyer said.The family of a woman who fought a developer to keep their ancestral land in Hilton Head, S.C., has reached a settlement in the legal battle that recognized her ownership, a family lawyer said this week.Josephine Wright, who died in January at 94, had been leading the fight to retain rights to the land that had been in her husband’s family since the Civil War. Her quest had drawn support from celebrities, including Snoop Dogg and Kyrie Irving.The company that owns the development neighboring her property, Bailey Point Investment, had sued Ms. Wright in February 2023, claiming encroachment. The company said that her satellite dish, shed and screened porch trespassed on its land, which had “significantly delayed and hindered” development.The two parties had agreed on the terms of a settlement before Ms. Wright died in January, but the documents were not signed, so they had to wait until it was determined who would be authorized to sign on behalf of her estate, Roberts Vaux, the family’s lawyer said in an email.Mr. Vaux declined to provide details of the settlement, but said that the land that Ms. Wright claimed is “confirmed as hers.”A lawyer representing Bailey Point Investment did not immediately respond to requests for comment.A family spokeswoman, Altimese Nichole, told South Carolina Public Radio that the settlement requires that Bailey Point Investment stop contacting the family about acquiring the land and that it fix a roof on the property, put up a privacy fence and provide landscaping.Ms. Wright had previously told The New York Times that her husband inherited the 1.8-acre property from his parents, and that it was put in her name after he died in 1998.The property has been a gathering spot for Ms. Wright’s seven children, 40 grandchildren, 50 great-grandchildren and 16 great-great-grandchildren, she had said.Ms. Wright’s predicament, however, wasn’t all that unique among residents of Hilton Head, S.C., an island 100 miles from Charleston, S.C.Land in the area was owned by many Black families who had settled there long before developers arrived in the 1950s and made it a tourist destination, Mel Campbell, 75, a community elder previously told the Times. Many of the Black families were descendants of West and Central Africans who were enslaved and worked on rice, indigo and cotton plantations.Many families were offered large checks from developers for their land, Ms Wright said. She said that she had refused when she was offered $39,000 for the land years ago.Ms. Wright told The Times in August that the land’s value was not only monetary. “It’s a family thing,” she said then, “and we want to keep it that way forever.” More

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      Trump Seeks to Delay Jan. 6 Civil Cases

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      The former president’s lawyers told the judge overseeing the proceedings it would be unfair to put on a defense now because it might reveal his strategy for the criminal case on related charges.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump asked a judge on Tuesday night to pause a group of civil lawsuits seeking to hold him accountable for the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, until after his federal criminal trial connected to the same events was over.The request by the lawyers to pause the civil cases was the latest example of Mr. Trump trying to pit his multiple legal matters against one another in an effort to delay them. In the past several weeks, the former president and his lawyers have managed to gum up each of the four criminal cases he is facing, sometimes by persuading judges that the timing of the various proceedings were in conflict with one another.In their request for a pause in the civil cases, Mr. Trump’s lawyers told Judge Amit P. Mehta, who is overseeing the proceedings, that it would be unfair to the former president to be forced to defend himself against the suits at this point. They said that in so doing, he might reveal his strategy for defending himself against related criminal charges brought against him by the special counsel Jack Smith.“Given the substantial overlap in factual and legal allegations between these cases and the D.C. criminal case,” the lawyers wrote, there is “a substantial risk that proceeding in this matter now will expose the defense’s theory to the prosecution in advance of trial.”The lawyers added, “This would prejudice President Trump’s ability to effectively defend himself in both these civil cases and the special counsel criminal matter.”In the months after Jan. 6, a half-dozen lawsuits were filed against Mr. Trump by members of Congress and police officers who served at the Capitol that day, accusing him of inciting the mob that stormed the building. The lawsuits, which all are being heard in Federal District Court in Washington, have sought unspecified financial damages from Mr. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Sues ABC and Stephanopoulos, Saying They Defamed Him

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      Former President Donald J. Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against ABC News on Monday, arguing that the anchor George Stephanopoulos had harmed his reputation by saying multiple times on-air that Mr. Trump had been found liable for raping the writer E. Jean Carroll.A jury in a Manhattan civil case last year found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Ms. Carroll, but did not find the former president liable for rape. The judge, however, later clarified that because of New York’s narrow legal definition of “rape,” the jury’s finding did not mean that Ms. Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”Mr. Stephanopoulos, who was named as a co-defendant, said Mr. Trump was found liable for rape during a contentious interview on March 10 with Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina. During the interview, Mr. Stephanopoulos asked Ms. Mace, who has spoken publicly about being raped as a teenager, why she continued to support Mr. Trump in light of the outcome of the civil case.Mr. Trump, who often galvanizes his supporters by attacking the press, has filed a string of unsuccessful defamation suits against major media organizations. Federal judges have dismissed his suits against CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post.ABC News had no comment on Monday. Mr. Trump’s suit was filed in federal court in the Southern District of Florida. More

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      Larry H. Parker, Famed Personal Injury Attorney, Dies at 75

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      In the Los Angeles area, Mr. Parker was a common sight on billboards and television commercials in which he promised to stand up to faceless insurance companies.Larry H. Parker, an accident and personal injury lawyer whose television commercials promised he’d “fight for you” and became staples in living rooms across Los Angeles, died on March 6 in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. He was 75.His death was confirmed by his son, Justin Parker, who did not cite the cause.Over the years, Angelenos became familiar with Mr. Parker’s personal brand of braggadocio and promise, as his face could be seen on billboards across the city and on television ads.“When it comes to the law, you want someone who carries a big stick,” a narrator says in one commercial that cuts from a hockey brawl to a shot of Mr. Parker in a suit and glasses, standing with both hands on a desk, ready for a courtroom showdown.“People sometimes ask me why I seem so angry in my television commercials,” Mr. Parker said in another ad. “Well the truth is I am angry. I’m angry when big insurance companies take advantage of little people.”His ads cultivated an image of a legal brawler whose menacing presence on the screen could be used in a plaintiff’s favor.It appeared that those who were injured were eager to engage the services of his firm, the Law Offices of Larry H. Parker. Since its founding 50 years ago, the firm has recovered more than $2 billion in verdicts and settlements, according to its website.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Five Ways Buying and Selling a House Could Change

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      The National Association of Realtors has agreed to change its policies to settle several lawsuits brought by home sellers — a move that could reduce commissions.A settlement reached this week threatens to strike a blow to an established standard of residential real estate: the 6 percent sales commission. It also will change who pays it. The deal, reached after a yearslong court battle initially brought by a group of home sellers in Missouri, calls for the powerful National Association of Realtors, which has long regulated the way U.S. homes are sold, to amend its rules on how Realtors for sellers and buyers are compensated.In most real estate transactions in the United States, both the seller and buyer have an agent representing them. For decades, there’s been a standard for paying these agents: a commission of between 5 and 6 percent of the home’s sale price, covered by the seller and split between the two agents.Commission rates are significantly lower in many other countries. In Britain, they are just above 1 percent, while in Singapore, the Netherlands and Denmark, they hover between 2 and 3 percent, according to a study by the investment firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. The homeowners who sued in federal court in Missouri said that N.A.R., through its rules on agent compensation, conspired to artificially inflate the commissions paid to real estate agents.Now those rules are set to change as early as July, pending court approval of the settlement that includes N.A.R.’s agreement to pay $418 million in damages.There could be more room for negotiation.Real estate agents argue that commissions have long been negotiable, and the standard 5 to 6 percent is practice rather than precept.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Connecticut Trooper, Brian North, Is Acquitted in Killing of a Black Teenager

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      Brian North faced up to 40 years in prison for firing seven times at Mubarak Soulemane after a car chase.A former Connecticut state trooper was acquitted on Friday of manslaughter and other charges in the fatal shooting of a 19-year-old Black man after a car chase four years ago.The trooper, Brian D. North, was criminally charged in 2022 in the killing of the teenager, Mubarak Soulemane, on Jan. 15, 2020. The killing occurred after Mr. Soulemane, who had schizophrenia, led state troopers on a chase that ended in West Haven, Conn., where Mr. North, who is white, fired seven shots through the driver’s side window.The six-person jury hearing the case in Milford found Mr. North not guilty on all charges, including manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide. Mr. North’s lawyers clapped him on the back as the jury foreman announced the verdict.“This was a difficult case,” Judge H. Gordon Hall of State Superior Court told the jury. “The work that you did was hard, and like I told you in the first place, you won’t ever forget it.”Mr. North was the first Connecticut law enforcement officer to be charged in a fatal shooting in almost 20 years, The Connecticut Post reported.The defense centered on a finding that Mr. Soulemane was holding a knife inside the car when Mr. North shot him, according an investigation by the state’s Office of Inspector General, which led to the charges.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More