Class action lawsuit filed against Lenovo over Superfish

Re:Class action lawsuit filed against Lenovo over Superfish by rayiner on Monday May 11, 2015 @01:43PM (#9526480)

Is there a more efficient system? That's not a rhetorical question. Especially for cases like these where actual damages are either speculative or small enough that they wouldn't ring the bell of government prosecutors. I think a compelling answer is: do nothing, let the reputation economy handle the situation. But the reputation economy works on information, and litigation generates a lot of very good (vetted and authenticated) information.

Re: cy pres awards, while Pearson v. NBTY (out of the 7th Circuit) did not involve a residual award, it did strongly imply that they would be unreasonable when, as here, the class members could be individually identified and compensated directly. More generally, after the 7th Circuit's recent cases on the subject, cy pres awards are low hanging fruit for objectors and plaintiffs' counsel have an incentive to structure settlements to avoid such challenges.

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Re:Class action lawsuit filed against Lenovo over Superfish by bradleyjg on Monday May 11, 2015 @03:21PM (#9527228)

Thank you for the reply.

Without writing an entire law review article in the comments, I'd say if no government (state or federal) can be bothered, given that they could almost certainly get a fine for less than $4 million (that's a lot of GS-11 man-hours) then reliance on the reputation economy seems like a good alternative.

And while discovery can be useful for getting information, in this case the information was publicized based on the workings of a different reputation economy (the security research community).

There may be some case that slip through the cracks, but I am unconvinced that the sui generis (to the US) opt-out class action mass tort system does more good than harm.

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