We had a guy in Australia trying to use our trademark, in the US they would call my bluff and I would have to spend tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to sue. In Australia we sent a polite letter, outlined our case that was pretty clear, reminded him he would pay our legal if we escalated and made it clear we would, and the result was immediate.
In short, companies shouldn’t be incentivized to play game theory on whether or not you will sue me if I trample your rights.
Thus, in instances where they are objectively wrong, they lose big. In instances you are objectively wrong, you lose big. In instances where it is not black and white, where there is merit to both sides of the argument, you settle. All this is achieved with little intervention by the courts.
Note also that the "loser" factors in offers to settle. So if I offer you $10,000 to settle and you refuse and the court awards only $5,000 to you, you are the one that has to pay my legal bill, even though I am the one that "lost".
If one party wins, they do not have to pay the legal fees of the looser.
Settlement offers have no bearing on this.
If one party wins, their (reasonable) legal fees usually are paid by the loosing party. Except if the judge orders both sides to pay their own.
If you offer £10k settlement, and I refuse, and I win £5k, you’d have to give me £5k, plus pay my and your legal fees. What I don’t get to say is you offered £10k so I want that instead.
It's a case of "if I owe a hotel $200, that's my problem, if Booking.com owes a hotel $200,000 that's the hotel's problem"
If you owe some government 500 billion, you are probably also a government.
For punishing corporations (for whatever legal reason) I would rather see a percentage of c-suite compensation for a time period (including end of year bonuses) confiscated, maybe along with a fine based on profit (so stock values are hit as well, so that both can't be used to avoid penalties and also to signal to the market it's a bad idea).
The problem with fining a company is that often you hurt a lot of the lower ranked employees that had no power and often no knowledge of the problems, and usually weren't involved in any way, sometimes to the point where they lose their jobs if the company is hurting to a much larger degree than the people running the company do, which is why punishing corporations is sometimes hard.
We need to incentivize and punish the people that actually decide the problematic policies and actions and not those that just happen to be in proximity and/or are linked financially, to the degree that we can (obviously it's hard and no perfect solution exists).
Fine the investors. Everyone who owned a share when the violation occurred takes a lick.
If you go after c-levels, what will happen is they'll devise some sort of time deferred compensation avoids the penalties you want to impose. The board needs a CEO after all, and CEOs are reluctant to run a company if they know they'll just have their paycheck confiscated.
A fine to the investor is literally taking money out of their pocket. Before they receive the dividend check. Even if it nets the same to them in the long run, it will feel different. It will be true punishment rather than reduced reward at a later date.
Corporations are made of people, and can by large multinationals, or small mom and pop operations with a few tens of people (or less). Should someone that has a company that runs a few ice cream shops in town go to jail because of actions of people under them? Because it's not like it's always going to be something that was condones or expected from management, and while I'm okay with monetary damages that don't aim to dismantle the company entirely even if management didn't really know what's going on (that's maybe a good way to make them care and pay attention), I'm not okay with sending them to jail because of mismanagement.
Not only is that unfair, it would have a huge chilling factor on entrepreneurs. And not just the startup kind, the people that want to open a restaurant or run a small business.
And to fully put this in context, this is under an article about booking.com paying slowly. You think jail time is appropriate for that? What if they're having cashflow problems? If they aren't and it's intentional, how do you distinguish this from that?
I'm not convinced
US has a very individual centric attitude where everyone is an temporarily inconvenienced millionare and Europe has a much more collective attitude. I will take the European attitude over the US one any day of the week (and I'm from neither, I'm Antipodean).
Every billionare is a policy failure.
FWIW, I think the EU's recent legal behavior is only about 1/3 foreign-company envy. There's a lot of misguided do-gooderism and a large dash of control-freakery, too, not to mention intelligence and LEO wishlists.
That's how it works everywhere, including in the US.
What you DON'T get to do is set the rules for OUR countries. Several of these companies have been under the misapprehension that's how things work, and they are being (slowly) cured of that delusion (far too late, but better late than never...)
determine which members of the executive team decided it was OK to literally steal from people and put them in jail.
The problem is that laws are basically just 'suggestions' if you're rich/your company is rich, and life altering consequences if you/your company is not.
There should actually be jail time for corporate leaders that break the law, and the potential of being forcefully removed from office or the company itself forced to shut down if poor behaviour continues.
We need to fix the broken & corrupt legal systems so that companies have not just equivalent penalties like individuals would (the equivalent of jail would be that all profits go to the state for the duration of the "jail" term), but be given even less leniency/benefit of the doubt since massive companies have way more resources to investigate & comply with laws than individuals do.