In the four years since President Obama appointed her to a seat on the U.S. District Court in San Jose, Koh has presided over some of the tech industrys highest-profile cases. Though federal court cases are typically randomly assigned, fortuity and her spot in Silicon Valley have gained her more influence over tech than any other judge in the U.S. In the ongoing smartphone battle, Koh has so far kept Samsung products on the shelves despite two jury verdicts finding the Korean company copied iPhone features and pressure from Apple for a wide-reaching sales ban. In another landmark case alleging companies including Google and Apple conspired to not poach each others workers in order to reduce competition and hold down wages, Koh persuaded the parties to agree to settlement (although on Friday she rejected the $324.5 million deal after raising concern it was not enough for the plaintiffs). Last fall, she found that Google may have breached federal wiretapping laws by scanning e-mails to better target Gmail users with ads. The suit claimed Google was in violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 - legislation that in theory protects e-mails but was drafted before they were widely used. By allowing the case to proceed, Koh called into question whether data mining was permissible under the original intent of the law and paved the way for additional lawsuits against Yahoo, LinkedIn and Facebook. Later, as a law student at Harvard, she was one of 11 students who filed a high-profile lawsuit against the school in 1990, alleging that hiring practices discriminated against women and minorities. After graduation, she took a fellowship on the Senate Judiciary Committee on civil rights issues. Unusual reputationWhat most prepared Koh for her place on the federal bench, though, was her move to Silicon Valley in 2000, where she specialized in patent and trade-secret law at two prominent firms. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, appointed her to a state judgeship in Santa Clara County in 2008; two years later, Obama, a Democrat, nominated her for federal court, and she was unanimously confirmed by the Senate. Theres a sense of taking your medicine, said the Koh courtroom regular, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of a case pending before her. Judge Ronald Whyte, whom Koh succeeded, said her knowledge and curiosity about technology makes her a natural fit for his spot. Praised by expertsLegal experts have lauded both her practical approach to law and her ability to interpret how dated legal theories apply to modern problems. In the ongoing Gmail lawsuit, while she recently denied class-action status to plaintiffs, her decision to hear the claim seriously called into question Googles practices and exposed them to the broader public. The statutory scheme suggests that Congress did not intend to allow electronic communication service providers unlimited leeway to engage in any interception that would benefit their business models, as Google contends, she wrote. Making a statementGoogle argued that Gmail users imply consent to data-mining by simply signing up because e-mail providers must scan messages in order to send them. #SF #News #49ers
Posted on: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 03:09:14 +0000
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