At a hearing in San Jose, California federal court on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh ordered Apple CEO Tim Cook to be questioned by plaintiff attorneys for four hours in regards in an anti-poaching proceeding, reports "Reuters" (http://tinyurl.com/ant9em8).

Internal emails show that executives at tech companies such as Apple and Google believed that an agreement to refrain from poaching each other's workers would bring real financial benefits, the article adds. Koh must decide whether the lawsuit can proceed as a class action, which would give the plaintiffs more leverage to extract a large settlement, notes "Reuters."

Last May Joseph R. Saveri of the national plaintiffs' law firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, says Siddharth Hariharan, a former software engineer at Lucasfilm and founder and CEO of InEarth, today filed a class action lawsuit charging that several of the nation's leading high-tech companies -- including Apple -- violated antitrust laws by conspiring to fix the pay of their employees and entering into "No Solicitation" agreements with each other.

The complaint seeks restitution for lost compensation and treble damages for the anti-competitive employment practices of the aforementioned companies. The complaint alleges the conspiracy among defendants consisted of (1) agreements not to actively recruit each other's employees; (2) agreements to provide notification when making an offer to another's employee (without the knowledge or consent of that employee); and (3) agreements to cap pay packages offered to prospective employees at the initial offer.