A national chain of nursing homes with three care centers in Orange County is being accused of systematically neglecting its patients.

A lawsuit filed this week in Orange County Superior Court claims the 13 Southern California nursing homes owned by Life Care Centers of Americafailed to hire enough doctors, nurses and others to adequately care for its acutely ill patients. The suit, which lists the family of a Lake Forest woman, Consuelo Deburger, as its client, is seeking class action status.

Calls to Life Care's headquarters in Cleveland, Tenn., and to the hospitals listed as its Orange County operations, were not returned. The company's attorney was not listed on the complaint.

The suit claims the company owns Orangegrove Rehabilitation Hospital in Garden Grove, La Habra Convalescent Hospital in La Habra and Lake Forest Nursing Center in Lake Forest. Though it's unclear how many patients are in each center, the chain typically runs facilities that serve between 85 and 120 acutely ill patients.

"This is a case where they draw in the sickest of the sick and then fail to take care of them," said Stephen Garcia, a Long Beach attorney who filed the lawsuit. Garcia – who said he has filed "about ten" other cases against Life Care Centers over the years – said in a press release that privately held Life Care owns more than 260 hospitals nationally and generated sales of nearly $1 billion in 2006.

A 2006 report on Medicare cases filed by the U.S. Attorney's office in Atlanta said Life Care Center paid $2.5 million to settle a similar case in Atlanta. That payout was described as the largest settlement ever in a "quality-of-care-based false claims" case.

She's also accused of going online to siphon more than 80-thousand dollars from the attorney's personal bank account. According to the indictment, some of that money was used to pay down the balances on the two fraudulent credit accounts.

Hufner was arrested yesterday on charges of identity theft, access device fraud, bank fraud, aggravated identity theft and mail fraud. She faces up to 102 years in prison if convicted on all counts.

A Long Beach attorney has sued a national nursing home corporation, which owns three Inland area facilities, claiming residents did not receive adequate care as they were promised.

Stephen Garcia said Friday that he filed the lawsuit on behalf of more than a dozen residents of 13 Life Care Centers of America located in Southern California. The lawsuit was filed Thursday in Orange County Superior Court on behalf of a woman who was a resident at Lake Forest Nursing Center, which is a Life Care Centers facility in Lake Forest.

Garcia said he might ask a judge to certify the lawsuit for class-action status, which could include thousands of Life Care Centers residents.

Life Care Centers of America, based in Cleveland, Tenn., owns more than 260 centers in 28 states, according to its Web site. No one there could be reached Friday.

Mark Krueger, Life Care's regional vice president in Corona, also could not be reached.

Life Care Centers' Inland area facilities are in Barstow, Corona and Sun City. Garcia did not immediately know the names of residents in those facilities who are part of the lawsuit.

Garcia said he wants an independent monitor to be appointed to oversee the nursing homes to make sure residents get appropriate care.

"We'll drop the lawsuit if they agree to get an independent monitor," he said. "We already sent a lengthy letter, and they ignored it."

Garcia claims Life Care Centers facilities provides residents substandard care and violates their rights. The corporation promises specific medical and therapeutic care but does not do so, he said.

Garcia claims the corporation shortchanges residents on care so it can keep more of its profits.

"The problem is the facilities don't have the staff to meet the needs of the residents," he said. "There's nothing wrong with making a fair profit. But this is a moneymaking bonanza."

Garcia said Life Care Centers facilities have been "unpoliced" because the California Department of Health Services, which regulates nursing homes, does not have time to inspect them.

Department spokesman Mike Bowman said he could not comment because he had not seen Garcia's lawsuit.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Web site shows Life Care Center of Corona was last inspected Dec. 23, 2005. Sun City Convalescent Center last was inspected Oct. 5, 2006. Rimrock Villa Convalescent Center in Barstow last was inspected April 13, 2006.

"We need to get someone in there to look after these people," Garcia said. "We're talking about our mothers, fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers."

In an email from Kyle Sampson at the Justice Department to US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former-deputy White House Counsel David Leitch and Colin Newman of the White House Counsel's Office, Sampson said that Rove had asked whether the administration planned to fire all US attorneys.

Sampson said that the White House Counsel's Office planned to fire "underperforming" attorneys, further stating that the majority of US Attorneys are "are doing a great job, are loyal Bushies." The emails also reveal that Gonzales discussed the firings several weeks before he was confirmed as attorney general.

The lawsuit was filed at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York “for massive intentional copyright infringement of Viacom’s entertainment properties”.

Viacom wants 1 billion dollars from Google and YouTube, also requesting an injunction that would prohibit the two Web giants (which are now one, after Google’s acquisition of YouTube last year for 1.65 billion dollars) from further displaying Viacom’s copyrighted materials on YouTube or on Google Video.

Google immediately responded saying: “We are confident that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders and believe the courts will agree. YouTube is great for users and offers real opportunities to rights holders: the opportunity to interact with users; to promote their content to a young and growing audience; and to tap into the online advertising market. We will certainly not let this suit become a distraction to the continuing growth and strong performance of YouTube and its ability to attract more users, more traffic and build a stronger community."

YouTube and Google’s lawyers subsequently declared that the DMCA is enough to prove Google’s innocence.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law which criminalizes production and dissemination of technology whose primary purpose is to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works and criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, even when there is no infringement of copyright itself. It also heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet. Passed on October 8, 1998 by a unanimous vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998, the DMCA amended title 17 of the U.S. Code to extend the reach of copyright, while limiting the liability of Online Providers from copyright infringement by their users.

On May 22, 2001, the European Union passed the EU Copyright Directive or EUCD, similar in many ways to the DMCA.

"Here there is a law which is specifically designed to give Web hosts such as us, or... bloggers or people that provide photo-album hosting online ... the 'safe harbor' we need in order to be able to do hosting online," said Alexander Macgillivray, Google's associate general counsel for products and intellectual property, during an interview with Reuters.

"We will never launch a product or acquire a company unless we are completely satisfied with its legal basis for operating," Macgillivray added.

Viacom’s complaint contends that almost 160,000 unauthorized clips from its cable networks, which include MTV, Comedy Central, VH1 and Nickelodeon have been posted illegally on YouTube and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Viacom is especially at risk of losing money from advertisement when its content is displayed on YouTube, since many of its popular shows, like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report or South Park, are aimed at younger audiences, which are also heavy Internet users.

Viacom slammed YouTube’s copyright policy saying that: “YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others’ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google.  Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws.  In fact, YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself while shifting the entire burden – and high cost – of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement.”

Notwithstanding Viacom’s accusations, Macgillivray is confident that Google will win, citing also a previous dismissal of another copyright lawsuit, filed by Nevada attorney Blake Field.

"This is an area of law where there are a bunch of really clear precedents, so Amazon and eBay have both been found to qualify for the safe harbor and there are a whole bunch more," Macgillivray said.

"We will continue to innovate and continue to host material for people, without being distracted by this suit."

By anonymizing our server logs after 18-24 months, we think we're striking the right balance between two goals: continuing to improve Google's services for you, while providing more transparency and certainty about our retention practices. In the future, it's possible that data retention laws will obligate us to retain logs for longer periods.

Last year, Google fought a Justice Department subpoena seeking to force the search engine giant to hand over a large amount of user data, including one week's worth of query searches and up to 1 million web addresses.

The DOJ requested the user data as part of an effort to re-write the federal Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which was overturned by the Supreme Court's 2004 ruling in Ashcroft v. ACLU as a violation of First Amendment free speech protections. Microsoft and AOL complied with the DOJ subpoenas, but Google argued that the DOJ would gain little useful information from the requested data. A federal judge granted the DOJ limited access  to the Google records.