Posting because I initially joined this lawsuit because I saw it here on tumblr, and also this is the first news I’ve heard about this thing in a long time.
If any of you joined that Illinois class action lawsuit against Facebook for illegal use of biometric (in this case facial recognition) data, watch your mail and do not throw out any envelopes that look like this or are sent from this address. My husband just today got a check for nearly $400 as part of the settlement.
More info about the lawsuit and settlement here. But the jist is: you had to sign up by November 23, 2020 to enter a claim. Checks started mailing out on May 9, 2021. The checks are for between $200 and $400.
Mary Tape was a biracial Chinese American woman who believed that her daughter, Mamie, should have the same access to education as white children in San Francisco. In particular, Mary Tape wanted her daughter to be able to attend public school. When the local school principal, Jennie Hurley, stood in the schoolhouse door to bar Mamie’s entrance on the sole grounds that she was Chinese, Mary Tape took Jennie Hurley to court.
In 1885, almost seventy years before the famous Supreme Court Decision Brown v. Board of Education desegregated American public schools, Mary Tape sued the San Francisco School District to offer public education to all Chinese children. Tape v. Hurley was one of the most important civil rights decisions in American history. In this groundbreaking case, Superior Court Judge James Maguire ruled that Chinese children must have access to public education: “To deny a child, born of Chinese parents in this state, entrance to the public schools would be a violation of the law of the state and the Constitution of the United States.”
Yet even after the court found that the San Francisco Board of Education violated the fourteenth amendment in banning Mamie from the public school, the school still refused to admit her, stating that Mamie had not gotten her vaccinations in time.
On April 16, 1885 Mary Tape wrote an impassioned letter to the Alta California newspaper, expressing her anger at this injustice:
“What right have you to bar my child out of the school because she is Chinese […] You have expended a lot of the Public money foolishly, all because of one poor little Child… It seems no matter how a Chinese may live and dress… they are hated… I will let the world see sir What justice there is When it is governed by the Race of prejudice men!”
From a 2017 complaint filed by David and Gretchen Jessen against Fresno County and the city of Clovis, California, for damages incurred during a police raid on their home. In June 2016, construction workers called the police after they witnessed a homeless man break into the Jessens’ house. The Jessens returned to find their home surrounded by law enforcement. The Jessens argue that damage to their home was “unreasonable and unjustified.” In April, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Fresno County and the city of Clovis.
The Clovis Police Department and the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office deployed the following:
Fifty-five vehicles
A K-9 unit
Two helicopters
Two ambulances
A fire truck
A crisis negotiation team in a motor home
A SWAT team
A backup SWAT team
A robot
Law enforcement officers did the following to the Jessens’ home:
Broke six windows
Ripped out the front door and an interior door
Pulled an office wall off the foundation
Used a flash bomb in the office
Ripped off the door to the laundry room
Used a flash bomb in the laundry room
Teargassed the laundry room
Teargassed the kitchen
Teargassed the master bathroom
Teargassed the guest bedroom
Teargassed the office bathroom
Teargassed the sewing room
Destroyed more than ninety feet of fencing with a SWAT vehicle
She had third degree burns on her genitals, needed a skin graft to repair the damage and was permanently disfigured, and left disabled for two years. Part of her original $20,000 claim was for her daughter’s lost income while she cared for her. Also, there were 700 previous complaints of people being burned by McDonald’s coffee, which they quietly paid off. They offered Liebeck $800.
Stella Liebeck was 79 years old at the time of the incident, and the settlement helped her pay for a live-in nurse as she was partially disabled for two full years after being so badly burned she went into shock. She passed away in 2004 with little to no quality of life per her own daughter. She originally sought $20,000 dollars to cover her eight day hospital stay (including skin graphs) and compensation for her daughter’s lost wages after she spent three weeks providing round-the-clock care.
Incidently, liquids served at 190 degrees is capable of causing third degree burns–which cause severe, permanent damage all the way to the muscle layer–within 3 seconds of contact with human skin. If you have a strong stomach, you can even find photographic evidence of her wounds with a quick google search. This didn’t stop almost every major news outlet perpetuating MacDonald’s coordinated smear campaign against her. MacDonalds’ justification for this was basically, well, all fast food is hot and we have better things to worry about. Literally. This deliberately manufactured overly litigious gold digger stereotype is still remembered today via the Stella Awards, which mocks all the “frivolous” lawsuits against your favorite brands. Named after a little old lady who was permanently disfigured and handicapped from a ridiculously dangerous product.
Classy.
Never,evertake a corporation’s side over aprivate citizen when lawsuits are involved.
She eventually died under the care of a live-in nurse from infection complications due to the fact that the damage had to be treated repeatedly over multiple years. While being mocked *worldwide* and constantly hassled by the media. The last few years of this woman’s life were a miserable hell because McDonald’s was too cheap to pay her medical costs when she asked.
I implore Congress to amend the statute to reflect the realities of file sharing. There is something wrong with a law that routinely threatens teenagers and students with astronomical penalties for an activity whose implications they may not have fully understood. The injury to the copyright holder may be real, and even substantial, but, under the statute, the record companies do not even have to prove actual damage.
In the US courts its not about who is right or wrong, people can judge this for themselves, its about how much money can you spend. My only fear is that this lawsuit opens up other websites and services to attack. Aurous operated in the blind, our client just allowed people to utilize the API’s of 3rd party websites (YouTube, Soundcloud), even then look where we ended up.
The mission is far from over, folks! Don’t sleep! We must keep going! Gotta see this movement through to the end. It is not enough to put in new law makers who seek police reform. Why? Because often their efforts are are rebuffed, not by police commissioners, police chiefs, or even the rank and file. No, the impediment to reform is typically the POLICE UNIONS. Because of Police Unions,…
