Comment by greenyoda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by greenyoda | Hacker News Reader

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https://nitter.net/TechEmails/status/1443263744906305543

Context:

> High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation is a 2010 United States Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust action and a 2013 civil class action against several Silicon Valley companies for alleged "no cold call" agreements which restrained the recruitment of high-tech employees.

> The defendants were high-technology companies Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay, each of which was headquartered in Silicon Valley, in the southern San Francisco Bay Area of California.

> The civil suit was filed by five plaintiffs. It accused the tech companies of collusion between 2005 and 2009 to refrain from recruiting each other's employees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

But why a civil suit?

This is a criminal matter. It should not be too hard to prove criminal intent :

> A few months later, Schmidt instructed a fellow exec not to discuss the no-call list other than “verbally,” he wrote in an email, “since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/02/google-apple-cl...

ok well obviously "why not both" would be the rejoinder, but I'm not actually sure I follow the reasoning that this is a criminal law matter?

There was both a civil suit (brought by five employees) and a criminal complaint brought by the DOJ. The criminal complaint was about a violation of antitrust law:

> On September 24, 2010, the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division filed a complaint in the US District Court for the District of Columbia alleging violations of Section 1 of the Sherman Act. In US v. Adobe Systems Inc., et al., the Department of Justice alleged that Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar had violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act by entering into a series of bilateral "No Cold Call" Agreements to prevent the recruitment of their employees...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Complaint against companies, not against individual actors for some reason. The final judgements in both resulted in meager compensation and achieved zero deterrence.

Why haven't Eric Schmidt or Steve Jobs spent a single day in jail or become felons? The DOJ didn't even try.

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