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Showing posts with label Penalty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Penalty. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Weird News - Top-notch hospital forced to pay $190 million because of doings of its doctor

The position of a Doctor is one of great responsibility. A Doctor commands life and death over their patients, and in addition is outside some of the restrictions imposed by society and laws. For example, Doctors of many specialties are exposed to the human body (with patients removing their clothes in front of them) since this is required for diagnosis of medical problems and treatments. At the same time, the expectations from Doctors in terms of ethical behavior is high, and any transgressions will be treated the same way other such transgressions are treated, or at a higher level. And when all this happens inside a medical facility such as a hospital, the facility is dragged into this kind of case as well.
Consider the case of a gynecologist, a Doctor who looks at problems in women that need them to remove their clothes, and there is a deep expectation that there will be no violation of their decency by the Doctor. When a Doctor violates such a trust, then legal cases and criminal prosecution will result, along with penalties for the same. When these have happened in a medical institution, then it is quite probable that it will have to pay penalties as well (link to article)
BALTIMORE — A gynecologist who used tiny cameras to secretly record videos and photos of his patients has forced one of the world’s top medical centers to pay $190 million to 8,000 women and girls, lawyers said Monday.
Dr. Nikita Levy was fired after 25 years with the Johns Hopkins Health System in Baltimore in February 2013 after a female co-worker spotted the pen-like camera he wore around his neck and alerted authorities.
Levy committed suicide days later, as a federal investigation led to roughly 1,200 videos and 140 images stored on computers in his home. 
The hospital is one that has a very high reputation, and this case would have hurt its reputation, as would have the damages. At the same time, there would have been immense harm caused to the women who were the patients of this Doctor, wondering whether they have been violated in a place that they least expected.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Fined a huge amount for downloading songs

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been fighting a battle against people indulging in music-sharing across the internet. For the past many years, the music industry has seen a reduction in the number of music sales through the physical medium (CD's, DVD's, etc.) and this reduction is being blamed on the amount of file swapping that happens (file swapping gained prominence with Napster, and when the RIAA shut down Napster through a court case, other, more difficult to control file sharing methods such as P2P and torrents have gained prominence).
The music industry and the RIAA have been fighting against these, although fighting against a much widely dispersed enemy in the form of torrent sites and servers is more difficult. The music industry also started attacking the actual users, getting their details from ISP's, and then serving them notices with huge amounts of damages. The RIAA also had some hugely embarrassing mistakes, suffering from targeting people such as single mothers, children, and so on, all of which were huge Public Relations disasters. In some cases, they have successes, with people settling with the RIAA out of court. However, in another case, they have won huge damages (link to articles):

A federal jury Thursday found a 32-year-old Minnesota woman guilty of illegally downloading music from the Internet and fined her $80,000 each -- a total of $1.9 million -- for 24 songs. Jammie Thomas-Rasset's case was the first such copyright infringement case to go to trial in the United States, her attorney said. Attorney Joe Sibley said that his client was shocked at fine, noting that the price tag on the songs she downloaded was 99 cents.
This was the second trial for Thomas-Rasset. The judge ordered a retrial in 2007 after there was an error in the wording of jury instructions. The fines jumped considerably from the first trial, which granted just $220,000 to the recording companies.


Not sure about whether this will be a success, given that the accused is a single mother who works for an Indian tribe. Also, the RIAA has mostly given up fighting these cases, so this would be one of the few such cases that are still existing.

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