Posted on 03/09/2007 12:04:05 PM PST by TChris
Whether Intel suffers severe legal consequences for failing to save all potential evidence in Advanced Micro Devices' antitrust lawsuit against the chipmaker will depend in large part on whether Intel can convince a judge it followed best practices.
[snip]
"They're going to have a very hard time defending their process," Robert Brownstone, law and technology director at the law firm Fenwick & West in San Francisco, said.
[snip]
Intel acknowledges that ... a small number of hundreds of employees whose e-mail was deemed as potential evidence failed to move all messages to their hard drive, which means the e-mail would eventually have been purged automatically.
[snip]
AMD in its letter to Farnan painted a far darker picture, saying "potentially massive amounts of e-mail correspondence generated and received by Intel executives and employees since the filing of the lawsuit may be irretrievably lost, as may other relevant electronic documents."
(Excerpt) Read more at eetimes.com ...
>>"potentially massive amounts of e-mail correspondence generated and received by Intel executives and employees since the filing of the lawsuit may be irretrievably lost, as may other relevant electronic documents."<<\
I believe all conversations should be treated equally, be they conversations in the parking lot or email. NOBODY who was not an addressee should be allowed to REQUIRE they be made public unless they were OFFICIAL company notification to employees.
I NEVER write down what can be said if it is even remotely possible it could come back to bite me. It frustrates some where I work.
What would you expect from a company that puts a "tracking device" in their CPU's and then denies it? Until that is they were caught red handed and had to release a software tool that would turn off the device(Which by the way never really worked, the software tool that is.)
"Sounds like Intel has been reading the Hillary Clinton and Sandy Berger book, Legal Evidence Retention for Dummies"
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Right on - you beat me to it. "I just cannot recall..."
There.
I fixed it.
They haven't had it since 2000. Current CPUs have no electronic serial number.
Fixed your fix. :)
"I believe all conversations should be treated equally, be they conversations in the parking lot or email. NOBODY who was not an addressee should be allowed to REQUIRE they be made public unless they were OFFICIAL company notification to employees."
I strongly disagree. Everything not brought into the building by employees belongs to the company. The servers that mail sits on are the company's. The wire that it travels through is the company's. The people who built and maintain the servers work for the company. All software is owned by and licensed to the company. When you clock in, you are on company time.
I could go on and on. Don't ever say anything in a company email you wouldn't say publicly.
The first was their infamous Math chip bug, the CEO came out and said that the consumer would never know the difference and that they were not going to exchange chips. Needless to say the backlash was almost the end of Intel.
Which is why it's deleting of emails doesn't surprize me.
>>I could go on and on. Don't ever say anything in a company email you wouldn't say publicly.<<
And boy, do I agree with that one.
But to the rest of your post, you and I are taking two principles and giving them different priority. For example, what I say at the water cooler (even on company time) is not company property, but what I say in writing on paper is. However, I have a perfect right to destroy that paper and I believe companies have a perfect right to destroy all non-essential emails (that have been deleted by the senders and receivers) and actually think they have an obligation to do so.
In fact, this company policy of absurdly sloppy data retention practices in an ongoing lawsuit is tantamount to an official invitation for the destruction of evidence. Someone should really go to jail for it.
For a company that is one of the very core establishments of the computer industry itself, this kind of negligence is far beyond the level of a simple "Whoops! My bad."
Head should roll. It's a spit in the eye of the law.
"I NEVER write down what can be said if it is even remotely possible it could come back to bite me."
Good advice. Bears repeating.
Never write down what you can say.
Never say what you can nod.
Never nod what you can wink.
Never wink what you can smile.
Maybe we should move this game of tag to Wikipedia?
: )
Almost poetic. What's the title -- "How to Become A CEO"? ;)
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