A senior lawyer for the city, Celeste Koeleveld, who is supervising the city's defense in the broader litigation of the tactic, said the settlement in the database case was "a natural outgrowth" of the 2010 law.
They also said the attorney general had broad discretion to settle litigation.
There has been speculation that Samsung and Apple have been in talks to reach a settlement, though the broad scale of the litigation between the two companies, with lawsuits seeking sales bans or damages continuing on several continents, could make that challenging.
That may seem steep, especially for a beleaguered company like RIM, but it is actually in line with the payment structure Nokia has extracted from companies who settled past patent litigation with broad licensing agreements, including Apple.
Animosity can be a goad to litigation or broader social change, but it is not absolutely required to pursue either.
Apart from litigation, the broader implications of being able to link climate change to specific weather events include determining which natural disasters have been heavily influenced by warming and which have not, and which should receive international adaptation funds as a result.
Several outside organizations are pushing for broader changes and pursuing litigation against several municipalities on their own, but political leaders in many of the small municipalities have already signaled their opposition.
In the broader educator population, however, litigation has occurred since the 1980s in Canada and in the early 1990s in Australia, to argue for employee status due to the quasi employer-employee relationships in FDC, with the intention of changing the system to ensure educators receive standard benefits of employment[ 64, 65].
When Byers and his co-authors did a broad survey of the climate litigation literature, they found that very few experts had considered this possibility.
