PORTLAND, Ore. (Legal Newsline) – Intel Corp. is asking the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon to dismiss consolidated product liability class action lawsuits filed against it, according to a motion filed Oct. 25.
Intel said in the motion that the multi-district litigation is now “principally a consumer-fraud case couched in the language of products liability, in which Intel is alleged to have misled the public for decades about its supposedly defective product design by stating (for example) that its processors had ‘cutting-edge security.’”
The company said the claims filed in the multi-district lawsuit differ from those asserted in the individual lawsuits before they were consolidated.
Defendant's Attorney Steven Lovett
| stoel.com
Specifically, Intel said the consolidated complaint does not include the previous strict liability and negligence claims or breach of express warranty claims.
Intel said in its case dismissal motion that the remaining claims are not valid.
“Intel’s purported misrepresentations, however, are not remotely actionable,” the motion said. “Plaintiffs merely identify a handful of advertisements, none of which any plaintiff allegedly saw, and each of which was accompanied by the express statement (mentioned nowhere in the complaint) that ‘no computer system can be absolutely secure.’”
In response to these claims, Intel said it never guaranteed that its products were completely secure “and was open about the existence of security vulnerabilities in its products.”
The company said the plaintiffs did not provide any evidence that Intel was concealing information related to potential security vulnerabilities in its products.
In fact, Intel said in its motion that some of the issues raised by the plaintiffs in the multi-district lawsuit have been well-known for years.
“A products-liability theory without any injury has turned into a consumer-fraud theory without any fraud - plaintiffs’ principal theory cannot get out of the starting gate, defeated by their own allegations,” Intel said in the dismissal motion.
According to the motion, the Oregon lawsuit consolidates individual complaints filed by 95 plaintiffs, many of which were individuals who bought computers and tablets that contained Intel microprocessors.