Peer to Peer accounts for 40% - 70% of all internet traffic (source). I'm pretty sure the vast majority of that isn't Linux downloads and WoW updates. Your 28 TB is a drop in the bucket.
that the MPAA and RIAA consider only two types of people
That's because they don't care *why.* All they care about is that they saw your IP in a bit torrent swarm, and now they can sue you for $150,000 according to the law. It doesn't matter if you intend to try and buy, or to backup a copy you bought legitimately, or to circumvent DRM. It doesn't matter if it was even you! It could have been a visitor, or a neighbor, or a hacker, or a spoofer. Doesn't matter to them. All they care about now it that they can subpoena your identity and send you an extortion letter, threatening to sue you for $150,000 if you don't give them $3000-$5000 (or I've seen as much as $10,000).
And I mean, why should they care? Why would they ever care about turning you into a legitimate customer who purchases their goods for $30 - $60, when you can be a no good dirty pirate and they can shake you down for $3000? Piracy is much more profitable for them, thanks to our broken copyright legislation.
The premise of the article is that content owners want to stop piracy. This, I would argue, is not always correct, as US copyright law allows some copyright holders to collect more money from content infringers than they would ever make from legitimately selling their product without any copyright infringement. Take a look at the RIAA and the porn industry. The porn industry alone has sued over 300,000 individuals for downloading porn over bittorrent, and has sued each for $150,000. They settle about 30%-50% of the cases for an average of $3,400. That's $300 - $500 million from suing infringers. How much do you think they make selling copies of their films at $30 a pop, or a subscription to a website for $15 a month? The RIAA just got a judgement for $200,000 reaffirmed, and you can bet they're going to hold that over the head of anyone they send a settlement offer to. Don't want to pay $200,000 like this lady? Settle now for the low low price of $5000, more than you'll spend in you're entire life on legitimately purchased CDs.
Seriously, this is just the beginning. The music industry is stepping back in the game after years of dormancy, following the road the porn industry has paved with their nation-wide network of copyright litigation.
Oh, and I forgot the best part: by their own estimate, at least 30% of the people they sue are not actual infringers. But they'll be glad to take your ass to court for $150,000 per infringement and potentially ruin your life based on shoddy, untested, unverified, unregulated, unlicensed "forensic" IP evidence.
So no, this is not about "The industry winning and stopping copyright infringement." This is about their ability to monetize infringement through the judicial system.
Re:Remember CmdrTaco's story for the first iPhone?
on
Apple Announces iPhone 5
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The rationale is that they didn't want to increase the width of the phone. With the weird resolution, they only increased the height, so it fits in your hand the same, the interface is the same except with an additional row of apps, and they simply center apps that are not made for that resolution instead of scaling them.
What's even better (for the lawyers) is that copyright infringements cases are a loser-pays system. Meaning that Thomas is not only responsible for her own attorney's fees, the statutory damages, but also the plaintiff's attorney fees on top of that. Her total cost of litigation is probably well past $300k at this point.
Computer Science is not about coding or programming, it's about the practices behind it.
I'd say that CS is even a step below that. I didn't address much foundations in programming in my entire CS grad career. I had courses in data structures, algorithms, graph theory, linear algebra, automata theory, discrete geometry, computer architecture, operating systems, graph theory, logic.... nothing I would really consider best practices in software development. I could develop an advanced algorithm for you, tell you its complexity, give you a detailed derivation and proof of correctness, but as for a particular software implementation and how that relates to a larger project my degree does not prepare me for that. That's not to say I couldn't implement it, indeed I could in a number of languages. I just don't assert than any generic CS degree confers any guarantees about one's ability in the practice behind coding, which I think has far less to do with theory than the more practical aspects of it.
But by the "making available" argument, the copyright holder could sue the 1st filesharer for making available 5000 copies, and collect statutory damages for 5000 copies. Then they could sue the 2nd filesharer and collect for 5000 copies. Then the 3rd filesharer, and so on. By the time they finish suing all 5000 filesharers, they've been awarded statutory damages for 25,000,000 copies of the song, when only 5000 copies were ever made.
Sort of true. They could try doing this, and in fact they are. But one of the counter arguments to this tactic is the following: 17 USC 504 (c)(1) stipulates:
(1) Except as provided by clause (2) of this subsection, the copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just.
What this says is that for any one action, you can't get more than $30k total from everyone involved in the action. Clause (2) raises the amount to $150,000 in the case of willful infringement, which most of these file sharing cases are. So if you sue someone for "making available" a song and you get $150k, then you can't go and sue someone who downloaded that made available song for statutory damages. Copyright holder would probably turn around and argue they're separate acts blah blah and that's something for the courts I guess.
Every single piece of text is a copyrighted work. It becomes magically copyrighted the instant it is created. So are pictures. But look at how those fly around without court cases.
If you want to pursue statutory damages you need to register your work within 90 days of first publication.
I've been using tablets in an educational environment since about 2006. I guess today they would be called Tablet PCs, but they were infinitely more useful in an educational setting for one reason, and it's not that they ran standard PC apps (in fact quite the opposite because most apps were no optimized for touch, etc.). It was the stylus, which most "tablets" lack today. Writing on my tablet with a stylus and being able to archive notes, search handwritten notes, reference supplemental materials and paste them into my notes, etc. were killer applications. The fact that my tablet was convertible also meant that when I needed to, I could set up my tablet PC like a regular laptop with a full monitor, mouse, and keyboard, and use it like any other laptop with fully fledged Office. Many here balked at the Tablet PC then, and continue to balk at the tablet PC now, but it was a hell of a lot more useful for me than my iPad ever was, if not only for the ability to support a proper digitized stylus and robust handwriting recognition.
Tablet PCs today still have major disadvantages, but I'm very intrigued at the new crop of hybrid tablet/laptops coming out from Samsung, Asus, and Microsoft. Transformer prime was half way there, but it still was a very poor laptop substitute in laptop mode (couldn't run full desktop-class apps, mouse support inconsistent across the OS and apps).
I see what you're saying, but under that interpretation, no art (books, music, movies, etc.) would not be copyright-able. The aforementioned are clearly not science, so they must be interpreted as useful arts, and all the aforementioned are protected by copyright, and not patents.
She's not liable. She was only found liable for the infringement she herself did. Liability isn't the problem; the problem is insane statutory damages awards. If the copyright holders can prove that her making the song available directly lead to 1000 cases of other infringement, then she would be liable for 1000 cases of contributory copyright infringement. But they can't prove that, and they aren't alleging that. The only thing they allege is she is liable for 24 single cases of copyright infringement, and that's fine by them because those single cases of infringement (again, without the need to allege or prove anyone else was involved in downloading) the maximum award they can get from that is $3.6 million. Why even bother trying to bring people to justice when it's easier to sue a single person for $3.6 million (and end up with a cool couple hundred gs, which looks like a bargain by comparison)?
Actually it's both downloading and uploading. From the original complaint:
Plaintiffs are informed and believe that Defendant... use[d] an online media distribution system to download the Copyrighted Recordings, to distribute the Copyrighted Recordings to the public, and/or to make the Copyrighted Recordings available for distribution to others.
The claim they bring is copyright infringement.... violating the exclusive rights of the copyright holder to perform (downloading) and distribute (uploading). Now, they cannot really prove you downloaded it, unless they're in the middle of that transaction, which brings up all sorts of unclean hands defenses (which is a sticking point in bittorrent cases). They can prove you uploaded it, if they downloaded it from you. But they also can't prove you uploaded it to anyone else. All they have against you is one single count of copyright infringement, and that's all they sued her for (one for each song). Even if you claim the damage of the infringement is not the value of the actual song but a license to play it, that's still a far far far cry from the $150,000 maximum statutory damages.
It'd be the equivalent of me reading Harry Potter to you and you writing it out while I read it to you.
You're half way there. To complete the analogy, the person reading harry potter would have to know the other was writing it down and would have to know doing so is an act of copyright infringement. This is called contributory liability and is a form of secondary liability. The other kind is vicarious liability, which brings liability to an employer of and employee who infringes in the course of his job. This contributory liability is very difficult to prove, which is why it's not often brought as a claim against a Defendant. You'll see if you read the original complaint that the only claim they make against her is copyright infringement. No contributory infringement in sight. That's because statutory damages more than makes up for the damages, and they don't have to go through the burden of actually proving anything that has to do with the mess of contributory liability.
This all goes back to the fact that the copyright holders can't calculate their damages because they don't know who's infringing. They don't know how many people downloaded off of Thomas. They can't prove who those people were even if they did know. But it doesn't matter because they just say (without proving anything) "I was damaged, and it was probably a huge amount, so I need statutory damages in the amount of $150,000 per infringement."
Other way around. I don't think I've ever seen any invention copyrighted, or any artwork patented. Either way, standard way to show something is not protected by copyright is to first point to the constitution, which grants Congress the power to enact copyrights and patents in the following passage: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" then to show that the work in question is neither science nor a useful art, and therefore cannot fall under the purview of the copyright act which derives its authority from the preceding passage.
Google wants profits; I don't think that they care about crushing Bing is why they do search.
Google/Bing is very different from iOS/Android. In the former, you're comparing the dominate player with 70-80% of the market with the newcomer rival who can barely compete. If Android and Samsung had 10% of the market and only sold a few million phones a year, do you seriously think Apple would have pulled this lawsuit? Of course not, which is why they didn't pull it until now. After all, most of the phones involved in the suit were last generation models. If Apple were so concerned about its image and protecting its brand, they would have sued when these phones were in their prime.
Now consider, if Bing started rising meteorically in popularity (as Android has) and the tables were turned, how long do you think Google would stick to its "Do no evil" feel-good philosophies. Recall, Google derives 96% of its revenue from search-related sources.
Not my blog, but the blog of someone who was was sued by these trolls. Eventually her case was dismissed, as the large majority are after the trolls meet their extortion quota. Of note, not a single troll suit has been tried in front of a jury on the merits. Perhaps these people target a good many actual infringers, but their dragnet tactics incur substantial collateral damage in the form of extorting completely innocent people for thousands of dollars.
Punitive damages are fine and good, but these are not punitive damages; they are statutory. Punitive damages are designed to deter a law breaker whereas the statutory damages written into copyright law are designed to compensate the copyright holder as a proxy for actual damages in the case where they are unable to accurately prove actual damages. So, at face value this has fuckall to do with punitive damages. However the copyright holders are trying to use statutory damages (which 100% go to them) for a punitive purpose because the amounts, being so obscenely high, allow them to.
This isn't about actual damages which would be higher than $24. (30 songs times 1000 people downloaded them, and 100 people who would have bought the song if it were not free == $3000 lost sales.)
Of course it's not about actual damages; that's why we're talking about statutory damages in the first place. The point is that the Plaintiff isn't seeking actual damages because 1) they are incalculable (incalculable not as in astronomically high, as in there is no possible way to actually calculate them) and 2) any approximation of actual damages is so incredibly low as to be an insult to everyone's time and reputation involved in the trial. Even your generous $3000 calculation spits in the face of the cost of multiple trials and the final arrived at settlement figure.
30 songs times 1000 people downloaded them, and 100 people who would have bought the song if it were not free == $3000 lost sales.
Interesting calculation, but it would be impossible to prove. Luckily they don't have to prove anything, because statutory damages are 10x more than even the most wild actual damage calculations they could come up with.
This is about setting an example to scare teenagers from downloading. And it's working.
But is it really? People are downloading more than ever (Bittorrent accounts for 1/3 of all Internet traffic). No, it's not deterring anyone, but in fact copyright holders don't care. They don't want to protect their copyrights anymore, since it's more profitable to litigate thanks to Statutory damages and cases like this. Why sell someone a CD for $20, when you can catch them downloading it and send them an extortion letter demanding $2000+ or you'll take them to court for $150,000? It's gotten so bad that they don't even need people to violate their copyrights before extorting them; there have been cases where companies monitoring torrent traffic will fake the traffic using known IPs and send extortion letters to individuals who have provably never even downloaded the file in question (anyone interested I can provide the citation... can't find it right now off hand).
they have no motivations other than to make profit
Maybe I'm a bit strict in this statement, but what I mean is, the Raison d'être of a for-profit corporation is to make money. A corporation may have other motivations (to help the environment, to promote local development, to realize personal dreams), but the undertone to all of them is to generate cash.
The problem is that you think that Apple's sole motive is profit and sales
Apple is a corporation, and like all for-profit corporations, they have no motivations other than to make profit. End of story. In fact, if their efforts to "make the best product they can" demonstrably results in a loss of money, or not making as much money as they could have, as a shareholder I could have a claim against them. Not sure what MS has to do with this discussion at all, but they're in the same boat as Apple: make as much money as possible. They are ostensibly more concerned with market-share since their profit model depends on selling many units at low margin rather than few units at high margin. But to claim that one or the other corporation doesn't care about maximizing profits of all other directives is plainly ludicrous.
Sorry, forgot the best part... the fact that with the award at $222,000 they're exactly where they were 3 trials and 5 years ago: at an amount which will most likely *never* be paid in full. How many countless wasted hours or lawyers, judges, juries, court time and space have been spent on this, what amounts to realistically probably no more than $24 actual real damages to the record labels (song downloads).
Again, sorry to reply to myself but this nonsense really gets me riled up, especially if you have a look at what the adult film industry is doing with copyright these days. If you're not aware, there's a massive nation-wide campaign going on where over 300,000 people have been sued so far in a grand perversion of technology and the justice system in efforts to extort multi-thousand dollar settlements. And this movement has its roots squarely in RIAA litigation tactics. See: http://fightcopyrighttrolls.com/
1st civil jury trial Statutory damages of $222,000 ($9,250/song).
2nd civil jury trial Statutory damages of $1,920,000 ($80,000/song).
Remittitur Statutory damages reduced to $54,000 ($2,250/song).
3rd civil jury trial Statutory damages of $1,500,000 ($62,500/song).
Damages reduced Statutory damages reduced to $54,000 ($2,250/song).
Seriously, statutory damages are a joke. The number is completely arbitrary and jumping around, seemingly randomly, from $54k to almost $2m. Isn't this a pretty good sign that things are FUBAR, and "statutory damages" is devoid of all meaning? The $150,000 statutory damages maximum (per infringement) was written into law with a very different context in mind than it's being applied to (industrial scale for-profit copyright infringement). These statutory damages seriously are completely defunct, yet copyright holders are exploiting them to no end. *We* as a society have provided *them* copyright to promote the *useful* arts and sciences. I think it's becoming very clear the art they are producing is no longer useful, but a determent to society. Perhaps *we* as a society should take those rights away, or at the very least severely curb them to avoid this utter nonsense.
Sure, they would still make boatloads of money. But why have one boatload when you could have two boatloads (corporate shareholder logic)? Just imagine the board meeting, where the board points to Android sales skyrocketing, and iPhone sales (and Apple's profits) falling proportionally, then asking Tim Cook what he's doing about it. His answer of "Well, we still make lots of money selling other things, there's enough to go around" isn't going to be particularly compelling.
Then again Android sales have skyrocketed and Apple's profits haven't fallen... which I think is what you'd expect in a marketplace that is still growing. I think Apple with their lawsuits are anticipating a time when sales are a zero sum game, and any Android sale necessarily means no iPhone sale (which is not the case yet).
Slashdot Mirror
Peer to Peer accounts for 40% - 70% of all internet traffic (source). I'm pretty sure the vast majority of that isn't Linux downloads and WoW updates. Your 28 TB is a drop in the bucket.
that the MPAA and RIAA consider only two types of people
That's because they don't care *why.* All they care about is that they saw your IP in a bit torrent swarm, and now they can sue you for $150,000 according to the law. It doesn't matter if you intend to try and buy, or to backup a copy you bought legitimately, or to circumvent DRM. It doesn't matter if it was even you! It could have been a visitor, or a neighbor, or a hacker, or a spoofer. Doesn't matter to them. All they care about now it that they can subpoena your identity and send you an extortion letter, threatening to sue you for $150,000 if you don't give them $3000-$5000 (or I've seen as much as $10,000).
And I mean, why should they care? Why would they ever care about turning you into a legitimate customer who purchases their goods for $30 - $60, when you can be a no good dirty pirate and they can shake you down for $3000? Piracy is much more profitable for them, thanks to our broken copyright legislation.
The premise of the article is that content owners want to stop piracy. This, I would argue, is not always correct, as US copyright law allows some copyright holders to collect more money from content infringers than they would ever make from legitimately selling their product without any copyright infringement. Take a look at the RIAA and the porn industry. The porn industry alone has sued over 300,000 individuals for downloading porn over bittorrent, and has sued each for $150,000. They settle about 30%-50% of the cases for an average of $3,400. That's $300 - $500 million from suing infringers. How much do you think they make selling copies of their films at $30 a pop, or a subscription to a website for $15 a month? The RIAA just got a judgement for $200,000 reaffirmed, and you can bet they're going to hold that over the head of anyone they send a settlement offer to. Don't want to pay $200,000 like this lady? Settle now for the low low price of $5000, more than you'll spend in you're entire life on legitimately purchased CDs.
Seriously, this is just the beginning. The music industry is stepping back in the game after years of dormancy, following the road the porn industry has paved with their nation-wide network of copyright litigation.
Oh, and I forgot the best part: by their own estimate, at least 30% of the people they sue are not actual infringers. But they'll be glad to take your ass to court for $150,000 per infringement and potentially ruin your life based on shoddy, untested, unverified, unregulated, unlicensed "forensic" IP evidence.
So no, this is not about "The industry winning and stopping copyright infringement." This is about their ability to monetize infringement through the judicial system.
Seriously, go check this out. They're going to print money with this thing.
And that they did...
The rationale is that they didn't want to increase the width of the phone. With the weird resolution, they only increased the height, so it fits in your hand the same, the interface is the same except with an additional row of apps, and they simply center apps that are not made for that resolution instead of scaling them.
What's even better (for the lawyers) is that copyright infringements cases are a loser-pays system. Meaning that Thomas is not only responsible for her own attorney's fees, the statutory damages, but also the plaintiff's attorney fees on top of that. Her total cost of litigation is probably well past $300k at this point.
Computer Science is not about coding or programming, it's about the practices behind it.
I'd say that CS is even a step below that. I didn't address much foundations in programming in my entire CS grad career. I had courses in data structures, algorithms, graph theory, linear algebra, automata theory, discrete geometry, computer architecture, operating systems, graph theory, logic.... nothing I would really consider best practices in software development. I could develop an advanced algorithm for you, tell you its complexity, give you a detailed derivation and proof of correctness, but as for a particular software implementation and how that relates to a larger project my degree does not prepare me for that. That's not to say I couldn't implement it, indeed I could in a number of languages. I just don't assert than any generic CS degree confers any guarantees about one's ability in the practice behind coding, which I think has far less to do with theory than the more practical aspects of it.
But by the "making available" argument, the copyright holder could sue the 1st filesharer for making available 5000 copies, and collect statutory damages for 5000 copies. Then they could sue the 2nd filesharer and collect for 5000 copies. Then the 3rd filesharer, and so on. By the time they finish suing all 5000 filesharers, they've been awarded statutory damages for 25,000,000 copies of the song, when only 5000 copies were ever made.
Sort of true. They could try doing this, and in fact they are. But one of the counter arguments to this tactic is the following: 17 USC 504 (c)(1) stipulates:
(1) Except as provided by clause (2) of this subsection, the copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just.
What this says is that for any one action, you can't get more than $30k total from everyone involved in the action. Clause (2) raises the amount to $150,000 in the case of willful infringement, which most of these file sharing cases are. So if you sue someone for "making available" a song and you get $150k, then you can't go and sue someone who downloaded that made available song for statutory damages. Copyright holder would probably turn around and argue they're separate acts blah blah and that's something for the courts I guess.
Every single piece of text is a copyrighted work. It becomes magically copyrighted the instant it is created. So are pictures. But look at how those fly around without court cases.
If you want to pursue statutory damages you need to register your work within 90 days of first publication.
I've been using tablets in an educational environment since about 2006. I guess today they would be called Tablet PCs, but they were infinitely more useful in an educational setting for one reason, and it's not that they ran standard PC apps (in fact quite the opposite because most apps were no optimized for touch, etc.). It was the stylus, which most "tablets" lack today. Writing on my tablet with a stylus and being able to archive notes, search handwritten notes, reference supplemental materials and paste them into my notes, etc. were killer applications. The fact that my tablet was convertible also meant that when I needed to, I could set up my tablet PC like a regular laptop with a full monitor, mouse, and keyboard, and use it like any other laptop with fully fledged Office. Many here balked at the Tablet PC then, and continue to balk at the tablet PC now, but it was a hell of a lot more useful for me than my iPad ever was, if not only for the ability to support a proper digitized stylus and robust handwriting recognition.
Tablet PCs today still have major disadvantages, but I'm very intrigued at the new crop of hybrid tablet/laptops coming out from Samsung, Asus, and Microsoft. Transformer prime was half way there, but it still was a very poor laptop substitute in laptop mode (couldn't run full desktop-class apps, mouse support inconsistent across the OS and apps).
Of course my double negative is meant to say: "no art (books, music, movies, etc.) would be copyright-able."
I see what you're saying, but under that interpretation, no art (books, music, movies, etc.) would not be copyright-able. The aforementioned are clearly not science, so they must be interpreted as useful arts, and all the aforementioned are protected by copyright, and not patents.
She's not liable. She was only found liable for the infringement she herself did. Liability isn't the problem; the problem is insane statutory damages awards. If the copyright holders can prove that her making the song available directly lead to 1000 cases of other infringement, then she would be liable for 1000 cases of contributory copyright infringement. But they can't prove that, and they aren't alleging that. The only thing they allege is she is liable for 24 single cases of copyright infringement, and that's fine by them because those single cases of infringement (again, without the need to allege or prove anyone else was involved in downloading) the maximum award they can get from that is $3.6 million. Why even bother trying to bring people to justice when it's easier to sue a single person for $3.6 million (and end up with a cool couple hundred gs, which looks like a bargain by comparison)?
Plaintiffs are informed and believe that Defendant... use[d] an online media distribution system to download the Copyrighted Recordings, to distribute the Copyrighted Recordings to the public, and/or to make the Copyrighted Recordings available for distribution to others.
The claim they bring is copyright infringement.... violating the exclusive rights of the copyright holder to perform (downloading) and distribute (uploading). Now, they cannot really prove you downloaded it, unless they're in the middle of that transaction, which brings up all sorts of unclean hands defenses (which is a sticking point in bittorrent cases). They can prove you uploaded it, if they downloaded it from you. But they also can't prove you uploaded it to anyone else. All they have against you is one single count of copyright infringement, and that's all they sued her for (one for each song). Even if you claim the damage of the infringement is not the value of the actual song but a license to play it, that's still a far far far cry from the $150,000 maximum statutory damages.
It'd be the equivalent of me reading Harry Potter to you and you writing it out while I read it to you.
You're half way there. To complete the analogy, the person reading harry potter would have to know the other was writing it down and would have to know doing so is an act of copyright infringement. This is called contributory liability and is a form of secondary liability. The other kind is vicarious liability, which brings liability to an employer of and employee who infringes in the course of his job. This contributory liability is very difficult to prove, which is why it's not often brought as a claim against a Defendant. You'll see if you read the original complaint that the only claim they make against her is copyright infringement. No contributory infringement in sight. That's because statutory damages more than makes up for the damages, and they don't have to go through the burden of actually proving anything that has to do with the mess of contributory liability.
This all goes back to the fact that the copyright holders can't calculate their damages because they don't know who's infringing. They don't know how many people downloaded off of Thomas. They can't prove who those people were even if they did know. But it doesn't matter because they just say (without proving anything) "I was damaged, and it was probably a huge amount, so I need statutory damages in the amount of $150,000 per infringement."
Other way around. I don't think I've ever seen any invention copyrighted, or any artwork patented. Either way, standard way to show something is not protected by copyright is to first point to the constitution, which grants Congress the power to enact copyrights and patents in the following passage: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" then to show that the work in question is neither science nor a useful art, and therefore cannot fall under the purview of the copyright act which derives its authority from the preceding passage.
Google wants profits; I don't think that they care about crushing Bing is why they do search.
Google/Bing is very different from iOS/Android. In the former, you're comparing the dominate player with 70-80% of the market with the newcomer rival who can barely compete. If Android and Samsung had 10% of the market and only sold a few million phones a year, do you seriously think Apple would have pulled this lawsuit? Of course not, which is why they didn't pull it until now. After all, most of the phones involved in the suit were last generation models. If Apple were so concerned about its image and protecting its brand, they would have sued when these phones were in their prime.
Now consider, if Bing started rising meteorically in popularity (as Android has) and the tables were turned, how long do you think Google would stick to its "Do no evil" feel-good philosophies. Recall, Google derives 96% of its revenue from search-related sources.
Not my blog, but the blog of someone who was was sued by these trolls. Eventually her case was dismissed, as the large majority are after the trolls meet their extortion quota. Of note, not a single troll suit has been tried in front of a jury on the merits. Perhaps these people target a good many actual infringers, but their dragnet tactics incur substantial collateral damage in the form of extorting completely innocent people for thousands of dollars.
Punitive damages are fine and good, but these are not punitive damages; they are statutory. Punitive damages are designed to deter a law breaker whereas the statutory damages written into copyright law are designed to compensate the copyright holder as a proxy for actual damages in the case where they are unable to accurately prove actual damages. So, at face value this has fuckall to do with punitive damages. However the copyright holders are trying to use statutory damages (which 100% go to them) for a punitive purpose because the amounts, being so obscenely high, allow them to.
This isn't about actual damages which would be higher than $24. (30 songs times 1000 people downloaded them, and 100 people who would have bought the song if it were not free == $3000 lost sales.)
Of course it's not about actual damages; that's why we're talking about statutory damages in the first place. The point is that the Plaintiff isn't seeking actual damages because 1) they are incalculable (incalculable not as in astronomically high, as in there is no possible way to actually calculate them) and 2) any approximation of actual damages is so incredibly low as to be an insult to everyone's time and reputation involved in the trial. Even your generous $3000 calculation spits in the face of the cost of multiple trials and the final arrived at settlement figure.
30 songs times 1000 people downloaded them, and 100 people who would have bought the song if it were not free == $3000 lost sales.
Interesting calculation, but it would be impossible to prove. Luckily they don't have to prove anything, because statutory damages are 10x more than even the most wild actual damage calculations they could come up with.
This is about setting an example to scare teenagers from downloading. And it's working.
But is it really? People are downloading more than ever (Bittorrent accounts for 1/3 of all Internet traffic). No, it's not deterring anyone, but in fact copyright holders don't care. They don't want to protect their copyrights anymore, since it's more profitable to litigate thanks to Statutory damages and cases like this. Why sell someone a CD for $20, when you can catch them downloading it and send them an extortion letter demanding $2000+ or you'll take them to court for $150,000? It's gotten so bad that they don't even need people to violate their copyrights before extorting them; there have been cases where companies monitoring torrent traffic will fake the traffic using known IPs and send extortion letters to individuals who have provably never even downloaded the file in question (anyone interested I can provide the citation... can't find it right now off hand).
they have no motivations other than to make profit
Maybe I'm a bit strict in this statement, but what I mean is, the Raison d'être of a for-profit corporation is to make money. A corporation may have other motivations (to help the environment, to promote local development, to realize personal dreams), but the undertone to all of them is to generate cash.
The problem is that you think that Apple's sole motive is profit and sales
Apple is a corporation, and like all for-profit corporations, they have no motivations other than to make profit. End of story. In fact, if their efforts to "make the best product they can" demonstrably results in a loss of money, or not making as much money as they could have, as a shareholder I could have a claim against them. Not sure what MS has to do with this discussion at all, but they're in the same boat as Apple: make as much money as possible. They are ostensibly more concerned with market-share since their profit model depends on selling many units at low margin rather than few units at high margin. But to claim that one or the other corporation doesn't care about maximizing profits of all other directives is plainly ludicrous.
Sorry, forgot the best part... the fact that with the award at $222,000 they're exactly where they were 3 trials and 5 years ago: at an amount which will most likely *never* be paid in full. How many countless wasted hours or lawyers, judges, juries, court time and space have been spent on this, what amounts to realistically probably no more than $24 actual real damages to the record labels (song downloads).
Again, sorry to reply to myself but this nonsense really gets me riled up, especially if you have a look at what the adult film industry is doing with copyright these days. If you're not aware, there's a massive nation-wide campaign going on where over 300,000 people have been sued so far in a grand perversion of technology and the justice system in efforts to extort multi-thousand dollar settlements. And this movement has its roots squarely in RIAA litigation tactics. See: http://fightcopyrighttrolls.com/
From the Wikipedia article:
1st civil jury trial Statutory damages of $222,000 ($9,250/song).
2nd civil jury trial Statutory damages of $1,920,000 ($80,000/song).
Remittitur Statutory damages reduced to $54,000 ($2,250/song).
3rd civil jury trial Statutory damages of $1,500,000 ($62,500/song).
Damages reduced Statutory damages reduced to $54,000 ($2,250/song).
Seriously, statutory damages are a joke. The number is completely arbitrary and jumping around, seemingly randomly, from $54k to almost $2m. Isn't this a pretty good sign that things are FUBAR, and "statutory damages" is devoid of all meaning? The $150,000 statutory damages maximum (per infringement) was written into law with a very different context in mind than it's being applied to (industrial scale for-profit copyright infringement). These statutory damages seriously are completely defunct, yet copyright holders are exploiting them to no end. *We* as a society have provided *them* copyright to promote the *useful* arts and sciences. I think it's becoming very clear the art they are producing is no longer useful, but a determent to society. Perhaps *we* as a society should take those rights away, or at the very least severely curb them to avoid this utter nonsense.
Sure, they would still make boatloads of money. But why have one boatload when you could have two boatloads (corporate shareholder logic)? Just imagine the board meeting, where the board points to Android sales skyrocketing, and iPhone sales (and Apple's profits) falling proportionally, then asking Tim Cook what he's doing about it. His answer of "Well, we still make lots of money selling other things, there's enough to go around" isn't going to be particularly compelling.
Then again Android sales have skyrocketed and Apple's profits haven't fallen... which I think is what you'd expect in a marketplace that is still growing. I think Apple with their lawsuits are anticipating a time when sales are a zero sum game, and any Android sale necessarily means no iPhone sale (which is not the case yet).