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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand what the companies hope to gain out of this aside from loads of bad publicity?

That was my first thought too. Perhaps companies can't easily differentiate between cases of stolen identity and cases where a bad actor claims their identity was stolen.

Maybe I misread but if they were Exparte, were they implying she wasn't there and it's possible all these verdicts were handed down without any of her input? In that case the companies may not / wouldn't know? Either way still a horrible situation.

Ex parte just means it’s an emergency and you need the court to move fast

No, ex parte means not requiring a party that would normally be required. It is _also_ used in emergencies because the process of pleadings, answers, and replies would be too slow, so you are asking the court to temporarily ignore the rule that the other party respond before the court issues some sort of order or response.

You still have to argue your way out of notice.

I expect they want a judgement for a specific damage, then when they can’t collect they have insurance to cover that specific amount. Without a judgement for an amount, their insurance would pay out a lesser amount.

Then I assume that the woman they harassed will get a cut of the insurance money for the unnecessary stress they endured?

Otherwise the court should just throw this out. It’s only 1.2m.

I don’t see any evidence that the company thought they were harassing someone. It seems they were just routinely pursuing someone they thought harmed them.

Hopefully, the judgement will be dismissed since it’s based on identity fraud.

>Without a judgement for an amount, their insurance would pay out a lesser amount.

Who in their right mind would insure Adidas (or any other internationally famous brand) for trademark infringement? You're almost guaranteed to pay out millions in "damages" per year.

Corporations insure for all sorts of things and a company as big as Adidas must certainly have operational risk insurance [0] for things like this.

I remember many years ago, the startup I worked for was required to have insurance as part of our funding round and it covered stuff like officers freaking out in public and all sorts of odd things I didn’t think was insurable.

Corporate insurance is pretty interesting in this regard.

And no matter who is insuring, in the US it’s probably reinsured by Marsh McClellan [1], a huge reinsurance firm.

[0] https://content.naic.org/cipr-topics/operational-risk

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_McLennan

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