 Hey everybody, welcome back to Retro Tech. Today I wanted to do a follow-up on a story that I covered actually about one year ago exactly from today and I hope everybody's doing well and I thought maybe I'd bring you a new story you're guaranteed not to read or see about probably anywhere else in the mainstream media and that is an article here from the register which is just a tech IT site I guess so the reason I bring this up is it's a follow-up to this story where there's a CRT monitor class action lawsuit from 13 years ago now and there's an update to it so I thought I'd bring this article was sent to me yesterday and I read through it and I read through the interesting stuff here so it's just going to go through some of the highlights on here because it's quite interesting on what's actually going on so first off 13 years ago there were first court papers were submitted so this is 13 years ago they submitted the initial filings and since then there's been 5,733 additional filings in the case so that means that the attorneys have been really busy with this one this is about CRTs that were made between sold between 1995 to 2007 which is a pretty long time period in the life cycle of the CRT this is actually right about the time when the patent ran out on Sony's Trenitron and then these companies everybody except Sony almost pretty much that didn't make the Trenitron tube had to get together and they decided to do an antitrust price setting where they all raised their prices to make sure that they were making enough money as well as competing still with Sony so that was the original case but again these are new this whole thing centers around allegations that the group of CRT manufacturers again got together there's the original defendants now look don't get excited because they've already closed off the list of people that can file or sign up to get on this defendants list or not the defendants list I'm sorry the people who are in the class action actually get a payout but again the this was filed originally in 2007 the brands that were alleged to be part of this scheme were Hitachi, Toshiba, Phillips, Samsung and Matsushita as well as well there was a small group of attorneys as well as a large group of plaintiffs who signed up to be part of these classes and pretty much fast forward there was a settlement it was 563 million dollars paid out to a fund pretty much and that was finally supposed to be done in 2015 but of course after they decided the amount of money fast forward five years of the present and the lawyers are still in Oakland California filing more paperwork and filings to argue over who gets what's left of this now 513 million dollar settlement which I'm not I mean somebody did take in notes in this latest filing that there was an expense of 29 million dollars in it and then maybe some attorneys fees they got paid no matter what so again the court has not made and the judge in this case has not made a decision regarding this so the lawsuit so still the lawyers are going at it and they will make out well though so that's what they're all fighting over this will continue to drag on until the final court and John Tiger or whoever else is the judge and this finally makes a final decision and then it exhausts all the appeals so this is really what happens in these lawsuits I mean these get drawn out incredibly long this is how normally every class action suit happens so basically if you bought a brand new CRT monitor from 1995 to 2007 and it was one of the brands I just mentioned they were price gouging by setting a price that was way higher for their product and then flatlining that like trying to make an even playing field with Sony saying we're setting our price here and then everybody else in the industry is going to set our price within that parameter to compete against Sony if you want to go to Sony you have to deal with their pricing the rest of us are going to be on one pricing pretty much so that they didn't compete with each other they were just trying to compete with Sony for the most part so this latest filing comes from this Scarpula who is Francis Scarpula an attorney for one of these subclasses which is the class action the people that are part of one of the subclasses who signed up goodness between 2007 and I think 2015 ish they signed up for that eight year period to be part of the class action excuse me and so basically if you run through this whole objection I did read the whole thing it's so much legalese it's ridiculous but there are still a bunch of objections from this attorney's group and it's it's still deeply rooted in things like problems with how the class was class members were separated and they were treated inequitably basically saying they weren't valued high enough the class cannot be certified because again and that's three different objections here for basically the members and the way the members have been she or classified or even legitimized some of them were saying they were not legitimate multiple class representatives do not have standing again that's the same kind of deal here's that twenty nine million dollars removed from the sediment as a tribute to claims from the or s and nrs so these two law firms maybe we're getting money which is from the complaint comes from them which is interesting so I don't know why that means they claim that somebody else was getting attorney fees or whatever but then and then finally class members was legally defective the notice so again they want to go ahead and send a new legal notice to every class member which I'm sure is hundreds of thousands of people probably the attorney fees request is excessive so then you got you know more legalese on what they define as excessive there's not really an example or it doesn't say the exact amount of money that the attorneys were trying to get but at the long the end of the day the only people that make out rich on these deals is the attorneys because once it gets down to it and they have a 500 million dollar pot the attorneys who are working on this are going to end up with probably oh I don't know maybe 50 60 percent of that pot on top of they'll probably charge the class members all their attorneys fees which from what I can tell is going to be between at least 30 to 50 million dollars for this long of a time and this much paperwork and sub lawyers and you know subcontracted lawyers and paralegals all kinds of things that's how this works they're going to do all that and then out of that 500 million there might be 200 million left and then that's going to get split out and sent out to I don't know a hundred thousand a million people who knows and then so they you know it's going to come down to where people are probably going to get like a check for 15 to 25 dollars and that hasn't even come to fruition yet and so the only ones who really make out like winners here are the law firm but I do see you know I will show you they so this is a this is an interesting thing about the law you get involved in a case like this and you literally have to keep it open and while there's a huge payout at the end of the day once it's done it can obviously take years and probably sometimes you know maybe it never get paid out who knows so you know that's but that's what they're looking for is that big payout at the end for years of work and some of sometimes lawyers can go bankrupt chasing these kind of cases so anyway that's just an interesting update if you want to see the original story I will put a link to it I did have a video here's that video Sony's competitions pays millions for cheating on TVs so that was the original video again back in May 30th if you want to check that out there's some more information there but it's just a really interesting kind of advancement in this thing and again if you ask me personally what I think I just think these attorneys are going to continue to duke this out and Bill eventually somebody eventually probably will get paid because these are big companies who actually have the money and are still in business and have had to make these settlement payments probably already to this point it's just this money is either sitting in an escrow or a fund or something waiting to get paid out I'd imagine so just an interesting story here and I definitely working on the d24 I've recapped one of the boards already and I've got the first video actually coming on that really soon look for that next week and then we'll get into just a whole long series on that d24 because I really want to completely go through every board kind of there are some surface mount capacitors that are definitely bad on some of the boards that's going to need to be replaced and that's something we've never worked with because they're not really in other pvms or bvms very much I mean really other pvms and bvms that are lower end don't have surface mount components or they have components but not capacitors so that should be an interesting thing and thanks again everybody and I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content