Latest news with #SPEX
Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Western Digital convinces US judge to throw out $552.7 million patent award
By Blake Brittain (Reuters) -Data storage provider Western Digital has convinced a California federal judge to reduce a $552.7 million award against it in a patent dispute over data encryption to just $1, according to a court order made public on Monday. U.S. District Judge James Selna said the award for patent licensing company SPEX Technologies wrongly included damages for aspects of Western Digital's products that did not infringe the patent, wiping out a $315.7 million jury verdict plus an additional $237 million that he had previously determined Western Digital owed SPEX in interest. Spokespeople and attorneys for the companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the decision. San Jose, California-based SPEX was originally formed to license technology from Spyrus, a cryptography company that developed technology for encrypting sensitive communications. SPEX said in its 2016 lawsuit that Western Digital's self-encrypting hard drive products infringed a Spyrus patent covering data encryption innovations. The lawsuit alleged that Western Digital data storage devices, including its Ultrastar, My Book and My Passport products, infringed the patent. Western Digital denied the allegations. A jury in Santa Ana, California, ruled for SPEX last October. Selna said in his decision made public Monday that SPEX could only receive "nominal" damages for Western Digital's infringement, slashing the award to $1.
Yahoo
11-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
NYPD ordered to disclose contracts, costs for surveillance, facial recognition tech
NEW YORK — New Yorkers may soon have a much better understanding of how the NYPD uses technology to conduct surveillance, track cellphones and maintain its facial recognition database. An appeals court ruling last Thursday ordered the Police Department to disclose all documents related to those technologies — and others — that were part of the estimated $3 billion in contracts the department entered into between March 2007 and October 2020 and were shielded from public view under terms of the Special Expenses, or SPEX, program. The NYPD, which has described SPEX expenditures as vital to public safety, specifically efforts to fight terrorism, could ask the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals, to overturn the unanimous ruling issued by the lower court, the Appellate Division, First Department. Jerome Greco, who heads Legal Aid's digital forensics unit, called the ruling a victory for transparency that will allow New Yorkers to see how their money is being spent 'and what privacy measures were included in these contracts.' 'We expect to learn how much is being spent on these different technologies and services and the terms of those contracts — how they're supposed to be used and what security or privacy measures were included in these contracts,' he said. Many of the technologies used by the NYPD are well-known, with various details revealed in recent years in a variety of ways, including in reports by the city Department of Investigation, during criminal trials and in documents, though heavily redacted, from the city comptroller's office. 'But we expect that there may be a lot that has been hidden and not previously revealed,' Greco said. The Legal Aid Society filed a Freedom of Information Law request in October 2020 for the SPEX information, but the NYPD refused, calling the request not conducive to a proper search for the information. Legal Aid then went to court, with a judge in October 2023 ruling in Legal Aid's favor. The NYPD appealed, but in the ruling last week the appeals panel criticized the 'vacuousness' of the FOIL denial, noting that the documents in question were easily accessible. The ruling also criticized the NYPD's later argument, that a request for the documents was burdensome. An NYPD lawyer had testified that to meet Legal Aid's demand he and one other NYPD employee with access to the documents would have to review some 165,000 pages. But the court ruling said the lawyers could not adequately explain why it would 'take years' to do so. The NYPD, the ruling said, most now 'provide a rolling production every quarter and provide status updates on its compliance.' The SPEX program was shut down in late 2020 after the passage of the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act. The NYPD has been accused since then of not adhering to the POST Act guidelines regarding new proposed technologies, though police have said the department is in compliance. _____
