collusion case. It is a class action suit brought by 64,000 software engineers in Silicon Valley alleging that Steve Jobs coordinated an anti-poaching pact between the 4 big companies so that they would not hire software engineers from the other companies in the pact. If you work in the high tech industry, you know that the only way to get a significant bump in pay is to get a new job at a different company. It isn't uncommon to get pay raises of 20%, 30%, or even 50% if you get recruited by a different tech company. This seems like an organized attempt to keep wages down, and there are apparently emails between Steve Jobs and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt proving it. It will be interesting to see what the companies do because the lawsuit is alleging $3 billion in lost wages but under antitrust laws that would be tripled to $9 billion. There are other companies involved who have already either settled or lost separate legal battles.

It will be interesting to see how the case plays out. On one side it looks like it was pretty clear collusion between the companies to keep wage prices down, but on the other side you can understand their concern and actions when there are documented cases of people working a few months at each job and then jumping to a new job to get their huge raise, and antitrust actions seem strange to me given that these 4 companies don't come close to holding a monopoly on the software engineer labor market.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/business/settlement-likely-in-silicon-valley-wage-suppression-lawsuit-against-google-apple-intel-adobe/articleshow/34040167.cms
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/04/18/tech-companies-hope-to-block-steve-jobs-evidence.html