General Requirements For A Class Action Lawsuit
Enough Plaintiffs - There need to be enough plaintiffs in order to make the Class Action process efficient for the courts. 70 million should be a sufficient number of plaintiffs.
Commonality - All plaintiffs need to be affected in the same way. The current situation seems to satisfy that criteria.
Class Representative - One of the 70 million impacted customers needs to act as the representative. With such a large group to choose from, something tells me that this shouldn't be an issue.
Adequate Legal Representation - According to the American Bar Association there are over one million lawyers licensed to practice law in the United States. It should not be too hard to find one to represent this case.
Those Criteria Seem Easy To Meet - So Then What?
Once the Class Representative hires the Legal Representation, the Attorney will file a suit with the court and ask that the court certify the case as a class action. Once the court agrees, the class action is established.
I predict that we will see our first Class Action Suits before the week is out.
>> APRIL 29th UPDATE:
>> It looks like my prediction has come true...
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Timeline History
For those of you who haven't kept up with this story, here is a summary of the update statements made by Patrick Seybold. I would not want to have Mr. Seybold's job this week. He is Sr. Director, Corporate Communications & Social Media, Sony Computer Entertainment America.
April 22nd - An "external intrusion" was detected and Playstation Network & Qricity services were turned off the evening of Wednesday April 20th in order to conduct a thorough investigation.
April 23rd - Sincere regret that the network remains down. Systems must be re-built and further strengthened. People working around the clock to restore service.
April 25th - No Update on an eta for restored service. "We'll keep you updated"
April 26th - Emails going out to inform account holders of a "compromise of personal information". "Clear path to have PlayStation Network and Qriocity systems" restored sometime within a week.
How Serious Is This Latest Admission By Sony?
It is quite serious. To put it in perspective, 70 Million people represents 25% of the entire population of the United States of America!
How Does It Compare with Other Similar Breaches?
According to datalossdb.org, this will rank as the fifth largest breach on record!
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| Source: www.datalossdb.org |
