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Apple to Settle with Tiger Leaker Vivek Sambhara
AC writes "According to DrunkenBlog which has the court papers, Apple will settle their case against Sunny (Vivek Sambhara) who was accused of taking a developer release of Tiger and putting it on a torrent site. Sunny was the student who gave an interview, and had Steve Wozniak donate to his defense. It is noted in the article that there is still a named defendant going to court and "a score of jon does"."
I wouldn't use eastgame if I were you. Eastgame is being tracked by the Hong Kong Police and Customs, because it is a very popular site here. Gamesir is too.
If he didn't fully understand what it means to have an ADC account, didn't completely read the full electronic agreement, and had never uploaded anything to a Torrent site, why is this worrisome? Sure, he is med student, but how many of us top geeks actually read the contents of the EULAs we accept when installing HL2 or Adobe Acrobat Reader? When was the last time you made it through Clause 14-A-ii in the click-through license?
Look, if you screw up, you have the chance of really, really suffering far out of proportion to the harm you intended.
Yes, that's the way things are, but it's not the way things have to be. Apple could have chosen not to sue him.
In Apple's defence, they played this very well. They sued, then settled for what everyone is assuming are reasonable terms (and not $10k or whatever the RIAA suits have been). The fear people had was that Apple was just going to act like the greedy bully that corporate America tends to create.
Had Sunny driven drunk
That's an awful comparison. Drunk driving kills, maims, and is an all around public danger. Copying a pre-release program might cost Apple a couple of ADC sales.
What separates this from the RIAA lawsuits, in my mind, is one simple crystal clear fact - he agreed to a legal binding contract. He agreed to not distribute the information, and then he broke the contract. This is serious stuff.
I disagree with you on the magnitude of this, although I agree there are differences. When you click "I Agree" it's not equivalent (I'm speaking about it being truly equal, not just legally equal, which it may or may not be) to reading it, understanding it, and knowingly agreeing to all of the terms. Likewise, with buying a CD, you are legally agreeing to the terms of copyright law, which include "agreeing" not to make copies for people.
You may choose to break one, but for goodness sake, understand the potential consequences.
Good advice, but I don't think it's fair to place all of the burden onto the end user. I don't mean removing all liability of the consumer. Just that it makes it far to easy to prey on those who don't really understand the legal consequences of their actions.
In comparing this to Apple's and the RIAA's actions, I think Apple struck a fairly acceptable balance--they didn't ream the guys, but didn't let them off scot-free either. The RIAA really shouldn't be, essentially, stealing $10k from people who are just doing what everyone's doing (I know, just because everyone's doing it, doesn't make it right, but if everyone's in a gang, you at least know killing people is wrong, but how many people really think copying music on the internet is wrong?).
Is there any list of the IP addresses of the unnamed defendants? I'm sure a number of people would be curious to know if they might be about to be screwed...
I don't actually intend to download it, since I am loath to trust a random internet source for my OS, but the question of legality is still interesting.
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