Apple’s Tim Cook will shortly be hearing a question something like that, as Justice Lucy Koh has ordered him to appear in court to give a deposition regarding alleged antitrust violations. Apple is one of a list of companies, including Intuit, Adobe, Google, and Pixar, that are being accused of agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees.

The case has been ongoing, believe it or not, since late 2010, when the Department of Justice required the tech companies to nix those agreements and reached a settlement with them.

According to the DOJ, the anti-poaching agreements reached back as far as 2005 for Apple and Adobe, 2006 for Apple and Google, and 2007 for Apple and Pixar. The settlement at the time prohibited the companies from “entering, maintaining or enforcing any agreement that in any way prevents any person from soliciting, cold calling, recruiting, or otherwise competing for employees.”

The current lawsuit is a follow-on action brought by employees who claim that the companies’ illegal agreements harmed their employment prospects. And while Cook was not Apple’s CEO at the time,  Bloomberg reports that Justice Koh told Apple lawyers that since Steve Jobs was copied on emails about the practice, she found it hard to believe that Cook would not have been consulted as well.

There’s currently no timetable for Cook’s deposition, but Google’s Eric Schmidt will be deposed on February 20, and Intel’s Paul Otellini will be grilled in the next few weeks.

If Apple and the other tech companies lose the lawsuit, which is being brought employees as varied as engineers and chefs, they would be liable for additional salary and compensation for the affected staff.

Justice Koh is the same judge who is presiding over many of the Apple-Samsung legal battles. You’d think she’d be getting a little tired of seeing the Cupertino company in her courtroom.

photo credit: igrec via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Popular mobile check in application Gowalla today announced a new partnership with Walt Disney Parks and Resorts.

The agreement will provide Gowalla users with custom Disney Gowalla pages, a collection of recent check ins and activities for specific parks and resorts, as well as hundreds of available custom Passport stamps, an image in recognition for checking in to a specific attraction.

Disney and Gowalla have come up with several ways to promote the new partnership, according to the Disney Parks Blog. Special events will be held throughout the year as well as the launch of a series of trips, a special bundle of attractions by age and interest. The company gives the following example:

“For the Little Ones (under 44 inches)” is a dream track fit for pint-sized park-goers to Magic Kingdom in Florida. It includes “Mickey’s PhilharMagic,” Dumbo the Flying Elephant, Peter Pan’s Flight and more.

Disney is definitely a high-profile brand that makes sense for Gowalla as it looks to compete for users with rival Foursquare. Both Gowalla and Foursquare recently partnered with government agency NASA, which brought a ton of attention to the companies. Interestingly, Gowalla made the NASA partnership announcement first, but Foursquare quickly followed.

On a more personal note, I was recently in Disney World and used Foursquare to check in all over the place. You can’t imagine all the stuff you can do on your smartphone while waiting in line for an attraction. But I’d have to say that after a few check ins, I became bored. If the Gowalla and Disney had this partnership while I was there, I’d probably be a Gowalla user at this time. Another interesting angle to these partnerships – which ones can make users switch sides?