Atlanta Personal Injury Lawyers Blog

Social networking has made the world smaller, as more and more individuals post more and more personal information on the internet voluntarily. Facebook leads the way, starting as a platform for college students, accumulating over 800 million active users in less than 8 years.

Social networks have become the subject of lawsuits, as misappropriation of personal information has become a lightening rod for litigation. Google recently attracted multiple lawsuits and negative press with the launch of Google Buzz, a social network similar to Twitter. Buzz used deceptive tactics to hack personal information from its E-mail service without users' permission, exposing and sharing private data, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Google led Gmail users to believe that they could choose whether or not they wanted to join the Buzz but the options for declining or leaving the social network were ineffective. Google shut down Buzz, reached a settlement where it must submit to independent privacy audits for the next 20 years, agreed to pay 8.5 million dollars to organizations devoted to internet privacy and is forced to pay out $2,500 to each of the 7 named plaintiffs in a separate suit.

Facebook ran into a similar class action lawsuit when it launched an advertising program in 2007, known as Beacon. Beacon tracked activities of Facebook users on over 40 partner websites (Blockbuster, Fandango, Zappos.com, Overstock.com), even if the users are logged off from Facebook and have declined to have their activities broadcast to their Facebook friends. Tracked activities included purchasing a product, signing up for a service and including an item on a wish list. Facebook eventually agreed to shut down Beacon, was required to set up a $9.5 million fund to support online privacy and must pay $41,500 to the 19 plaintiffs named in the lawsuit.

It is no secret that you should be extremely cautious when sharing personal information over the internet but the lawsuits discussed above raise the stakes concerning internet privacy. Imagine what other traps await on the internet if repeatable websites like Facebook and Google are willing to hack personal information. All parents should monitor the activities of their children and I suggest asking yourself two questions:

1) Do I want my grandmother to see this picture or post?

2) Do I want complete strangers knowing that about me, my locations or my activities?

Today the Georgia Supreme Court held in Atlanta Oculoplastic Surgery v. Nestlehutt that the limits on pain and suffering in medical malpractice cases violates the constitutional right to trial by jury. In a unanimous opinion, the Court found that the noneconomic damages caps in O.C.G.A. 51-13-1 of the 2005 Tort Reform bill, violate the right of a jury to determine the amount of damages to be awarded a plaintiff.

Although, recognizing that the caps were enacted by the Georgia Legislature to address "what the General Assembly determined to be a 'crisis affecting the provision and quality of health care services in this state,'" the Court specifically concluded, "The very existence of the caps, in any amount, is violative of the right to trial by jury."

What does this mean to plaintiffs involved in pending medical malpractice cases? Because a law that is unconstitutional was unconstitutional from its start, the caps limitation will be rolled back retroactively. Any lawsuits still before the courts, even if filed prior to the Nestlehutt opinion and after the 2005 Tort Reform Bill, will not be subject to the caps limitations of $350,000 for any verdict against one or more physicians and $350,000 for each verdict against a hospital or healthcare facility up to $750,000 and a maximum total against all physicians, hospitals and health care facilities of $1,050,000.

With the passage of the Healthcare Reform bill yesterday and the striking down of the caps on medical malpractice cases in Georgia today, this is will be an interesting week full of commentary and opinion regarding the state of healthcare in Georgia.

Who doesn't remember getting their first PEZ®? There are collectors of PEZ® and PEZ® Clubs. People trade PEZ® on ebay. And now PEZ® is suing a small California museum, the Burlingame Museum of PEZ Memorabilia, for trademark infringement. The museum was founded by devoted PEZ® fans who went to the trouble to have the largest working PEZ® dispenser in the world created for their museum. In fact, the 7'10" snowman dispenser made it into the Guinness Book of World Records.

Yes, PEZ® certainly has a right to protect their trademark dispenser and, in fact, must proactively work to retain that trademark protection, but somehow their suit seems a little skewed. Isn't this a great marketing opportunity? Seems to me that the parties need to sit down at the table with their favorite PEZ® character and work toward an agreeable outcome. Maybe PEZ® could become a sponsor of the museum which already markets and encourages love and affection for the candy dispenser. What could be better than an afternoon at a free PEZ® museum with the opportunity to buy more PEZ® memorabilia?

Read more:

PEZ Not so Sweet on Local Museum

PEZ Sour on Owners of World's Largest Dispenser

PEZ Sues Museum Over Giant Dispenser

Photo courtesy of Christopher at Flckr