One thing to remember: It is not actually the case that Apple gets 30% of the money, and the developer gets 70%. Each app has an "official" price, lets say $9.99 or $10 to make the maths easier. If you purchase it, the developer gets $7. However, Apple doesn't always get $10. There have been student offers where you could buy a Mac and get $100 for store purchases, which means Apple gets nothing and pays $70 to developers. Plenty of people give gift cards for Christmas, and if you buy a $50 gift card from some store, that store is taking its (generous) cut and Apple doesn't get $50, but still pays $35 to developers. I always manage to stock up with gift cards purchased with 20% rebate, so for £50 official price software, music or books that I buy, the developers get £35, I paid only £40, so I don't think that Apple keeps 30% of that.
Now Apple's plan is not to make money from the stores (thought is just a welcome side effect), but to have good app stores to make you buy Macs and iPhones and iPads. Still, if Microsoft got say 80% of the "official" price, Apple might actually lose money on that.
So what's the difference with this situation? Why would he be opposed to VLC on iOS, but be fine with VLC on the Windows 8 store?
He probably wouldn't be fine. Unless the Windows 8 store terms are different (they might be different in some subtle way that makes all the difference), or unless Microsoft were willing to fight this in court (unlikely), or unless Microsoft makes an offer he cannot refuse. Or possibly if he gave up caring.
Personally, I think he was wrong. On the App Store, there can be two licenses in play: There is Apple's license, which allows you to do certain things, like making several copies for private use. The developer has to agree that you have the rights that this license gives you, otherwise you cannot go on the app store. Then there is whatever license the developer gave you. My interpretation is that you have the right to do anything that _either_ license allows you to do.
With that interpretation, any objections because Apple's license is restrictive would be void, because you could do whatever Apple doesn't allow due to the GPL license that you got as well. It would be a valid objection if Apple allowed to do things that GPL doesn't allow, like distributing unlimited copies without source code (if one of the copyright holders objects).
They even asked the UK to hold Assange in solitary confinement whilst he awaited the outcome of his extradition appeals (bear in mind, Assange still, to this day, has not been charged with anything so they were asking for solitary without even a charge being brought) but luckily British justice is at least not quite as backwards as in Sweden.
What you say is misleading. In some countries, charging you is the first step. In Sweden, it is the last step. Since "being charged" is something completely different in Sweden, it is just fine that he hasn't been charged yet.
I like how, in the previous RMS post to Slashdot, people were attacking him, even pointing out some disgusting behavior in the first few posts. It makes me wonder how many shill accounts exist just for this purpose, for Linux and FOSS articles a lot of the time sock puppets are the first to post and are usually OT and/or trolls.
The message is what matters, and in this matter I support what RMS has said.
So basically you are saying there are ad hominem attacks against Stallman. But that is not _quite_ the case. The principle of an ad hominem attack is this: I don't like the argument, and to refute it, I attack or belittle the person making the argument. It's different here: When a person eats their toe nails in public, many people just find that disgusting, and they don't actually care whether anything that person says is right or wrong. They just don't care. It's not that the argument is refuted, it is ignored. It is even ignored _after_ hearing it.
Three things I'd like to throw in here. First, you'd think that after a few dickish maneuvers of making source hard to get, someone that got the source from him would post it up somewhere so anyone could have it (whether or not they bought the author's binary) I suppose the author may try to go after you for some sort of copyright violation, but that would only go as far as he was willing to pay his lawyer to bog down a court in the mud for. (which, depending on his money to burn and determination, may be annoying or expensive enough for the poster to just give up on, losing to "unaffordable justice")
I think something is mixed up here. There is an original author, who distributed some software under a GPL license. There is a second player, who distributes either the original or a modified version, apparently under terms contrary to the GPL license. If the second player modified the code, or added code, then he is _also_ a copyright holder.
In that case you would need permission from the first author (which you have) and permission from the second author to distribute. If the second author doesn't give you permission and source code, then he commited copyright infringement against the first author. You still have no permission to copy his work.
So _if_ you make copies, you could be sued. It would be an interesting defense, because by suing you the second player _admits_ that they themselves committed copyright infringement.
It seems to me that this is the fundamental problem with GPL, and some other, open source licenses; it all depends on the honor system. Sure, they are technically legally binding, but if nobody holds anybody's feet to the fire, that means nothing.
Your problem is that you don't understand how these licenses work. The copyright holder gave people permission to make copies, as long as they followed certain rules. This doesn't mean anyone, even the copyright holder, can force anyone to follow these rules. It means that anyone making copies without following the rules, or without having any other permission, commits copyright infringement, and the copyright holder can sue them for copyright infringement.
If you are not the copyright holder, you have no standing to sue.
Developers get 70% of the advertised price both on Google's store and on the AppStore. Which is a lot more than most get at Amazon, and more than anyone gets at any other store. At the AppStore developers have the advantage that lots of kids (and adults) will get gift cards for Christmas and will spend that money on iOS games.
"hurts the plaintiff in his or her profession or trade."
If the contractor did a good job and got an awful review, then the review hurt him. If the contractor did an awful job and received an awful but correct review, then I would argue that it was not the review that hurt them but the bad job that they did.
as exemplified by the infinite number of hits you get when googling "repair permissions", the universal remedy for all Mac problems (which are remarkably frequent for a faultless system) that never ever works, suggested by clueless idiots to helpless computer illiterate users every day
Background: Installing software mostly means putting lots of files in the right places, with the right access rights (permissions). Early MacOS X versions sometimes got that wrong. So Apple made installers that not only put files into the right places, with the right access rights (hopefully), but also added log files that described what access rights each file should have. So if something messed up these access rights, a tool could read the log files, check what access rights each file should have, and fix it if it was wrong.
All that was many years ago. Files don't tend to be installed with wrong access rights anymore. Software doesn't tend to modify these access rights on random files anymore. So "repair permissions" tends to do nothing at all in practice.
When your mother buys a printer and AirPrint happens to not work with it, she might ask you or anyone tech-knowledgable to make it work for her.
Since the iPhone has locked you out of doing anything that isn't Apple-certified, your only reply to her will be, buy a new printer. This time, make sure it has AirPrint support on the label.
And if you weren't "locked out", you would write a new printer driver? In your spare time?
Much more effective is to go with her back to the store, get a refund for the printer, and buy one that is AirPrint compatible.
It should be obvious that if nobody was allowed to have a gun, then gun packing criminals would be able to target anyone who doesn't look like an undercover police officer.
And if they did try that in the UK, that would be the quickest way to go to jail for a long time. Or in Germany, where committing a theft while being armed is automatically "armed robbery" with a severe sentence. (No use of the weapon, or intent of use, needed).
Also, if there is little or no market, there is little or no incentive to try to smuggle an item into a country. It is demand driven really. Why take tremendous risks just to increase your stockpile of items you can't sell ?
I few years ago a newspaper tried to investigate this and sent someone out to buy as many guns as they could in London. Within a few hours, not only had they bought several guns, but the news had spread that someone was trying to buy guns and the price had already doubled.
Since gun ownership is so low, committing a crime in the UK using a gun means every single cop is trying to get you. In other words, using a gun is a stupid move for a criminal.
Yes they can; by throwing one tenth of their $120 billion at the effort. I'd be happy to be part of it.
Let's do a calculation. The USA have about 4 million miles of road. Let's say you drive all the million miles at 20 mph, that's 200,000 hours. Two people in a car, 400,000 person hours, or 10,000 weekly salaries. It's not that a well paying job, say $1,000 per week or $10 million. To be generous, multiply this by 10 to get the total cost, that's $100 million. Less than 1% of what you are saying.
The solution: Apple needs to stop picking fights. I'm sure Google would have given them the full turn-by-turn system if Apple would have paid for it. Apple has great hardware and software engineers. But they aren't good enough to replicate the technology its competitor has spent over a decade developing in just one year.
Apple _was_ paying huge sums of money to Google for map data. They had the choice of continuing to pay to Google (which might have been a bad strategy, considering that for example Samsung doesn't seem to want to sell batteries to Apple anymore), or to do something about it. Short term pain, long term the right decision.
And mapping data is not "developed over a decade". It is developed, and then it is permanently updated. So starting from zero you are not _that_ far behind.
> Increasing yellow light times
Does reduce the amount of green light time, which decreases the number of cars that can pass through the intersection, which increases the traffic congestion, which increases the desire to run the red light...
That's actually not how it works.
Where I learned driving, the rules were like this: Green light means you can drive. Yellow light means you have to stop if it is safe to do so (and you don't stop if it is unsafe). Red light you stop - the traffic light needs to be set so that someone driving at the speed limit and too close to stop when the light turns yellow shouldn't see a read light.
The traffic light in the other directions must be set up so that if everyone follows these rules or violates them only slightly, everyone should be safe.
In the USA, it seems you get a speeding ticket if you are not through the crossing when the light turns red. And that opens time for manipulation: If you make the yellow phase shorter by a second, and the red phase longer by a second, keep green the same, then if everyone drives unchanged, the crossing is exacly as safe as ever, exactly the same amount of traffic gets through, but you get more tickets. "Best" case you make the yellow phase so short that it is impossible to get through the crossing before the light turns red, and everybody who reaches the traffic light just when it turns yellow has no chance to avoid a ticket.
Well, the solution to liability is legal - grant immunity as long as the car performs above some safety standard on the whole, and that standard can be raised as the industry progresses. There is no reason that somebody should be punished for making a car 10X safer than any car on the road today.
The problem is just that many people are bad at maths. The idea is that driverless vehicles, implemented properly, should reduce the total number of accidents, and reduce the number of accidents at any severity level. That means that total amount of damage is reduced.
Car owners do already need liability insurance - you have insurance, so whenever damage is caused by your car, the insurance pays out, and your premium goes up. Usually the damage will be caused by the owner, through carelessness, or a momentary lapse. Sometimes it is caused by someone else, like a thief stealing your car. It happens. So with driverless cars, you keep paying the insurance, except the premium goes down, because there is on average less damage. And if your car causes an accident with damage, your insurance pays just as it does now.
So if 40,000 die every year now, wouldn't insurance companies doing liability insurance have to pay out 40,000 times 8 million dollars = 320 billion dollars? So we are looking at 304 billion dollars saved every year?
The sad truth: How much people value something is proportional to what it costs them to get it. That principle applies in many areas of life. Geeks who give free computer support to friends and family know that. (My recommendation: Print a bill with a reasonable hourly rate, say £50 per hour, add a hundred percent rebate, and hand them the bill. Makes people a lot more polite if they realise that the next virus infection will cost them £100 if they don't behave well).
The same goes quite obvious for "Open Source" or more general, for "no payment" software. It costs nothing, so they have no respect for the developer.
They will still arrest you for, among other things, creating a disturbance, interfering with an officer, resisting arrest, mopery and dopery.;)
And so you will still need a good lawyer.
The idea is that you record _secretly_. You know, where nobody notices. Especially the police.
Well, it would be a good idea for someone to create an iPhone app that streams video directly to the cloud, so no evidence can be destroyed.
Because Apple wants to drive Samsung out of the smartphone/tablet business. If HTC licensed the same patents for a reasonable price, Samsung would have some leverage to get the same deal and stay in the market.
There is of course the argument that if A uses patents illegally and gains a competitive advantage against B, then the patent holder would quite reasonably license the patent to B so we get better competition, and not ever license the patent to A.
Wouldn't the HTC settlement help Apple's case? If HTC will settle patent claims with Apple, why doesn't Samsung do so on similar terms? Why does Apple have to sue Samsung when Apple is this big reasonable company that just wants to cross-license its patent portfolio at a reasonable price?
Well, Apple doesn't _want_ to cross-license its patents. However, the fact is that Samsung used these patents without permission, and Samsung sales have gone up, while HTC sales have gone down. So here is what most likely happened:
Someone at the negotiation table said, look, HTC isn't really Apple's enemy, Samsung is. And Apple isn't really HTCs enemy, Samsung is. So much better to join forces, license these patents to HTC, and to Microsoft, and to anyone other than Samsung. And do their best to f*** Samsung together. Samsung shouldn't be too surprised if there will be some HTC lawsuits following.
You can say that it "unfair". You can say anything you like, but that does not make it so. However, when a company is taking advantage of a perfectly legal tax minimization plan, it is not fair to blame the company.
You are right, one shouldn't _blame_ the company. On the other hand, we _should_ grab them by the balls, squeeze hard, and extract any money we can.
If laws can be applied retroactively, they are not laws. When you apply laws retroactively, you are saying, "Yesterday, when you did that it was legal, but today we made it illegal, so we are going to punish you."
On the other hand, if a government does that, and the people in the country agree with it, then what is Amazon going to do?
And this is tax law. It's not "what you did was legal, and now we declare it legal". It's "everyone is supposed to pay a fair amount of taxes. We set up rules to calculate, as best as we could, the amount of fair taxes for everyone. You managed to set up things so that the taxes calculated by our rules were very much less than the fair amount of taxes. Now we fix this, and since you didn't pay a fair amount of taxes in the past, we fix it retroactively".
Someone was nice enough to post the original ruling. It seems that someone else used this exit node to illegally download some copyrighted work. The person running the exit node was found to be not the downloader, therefore no fine or anything, _but_ he was ordered to prevent further illegal downloading of copyrighted works by closing the node down.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing to remember: It is not actually the case that Apple gets 30% of the money, and the developer gets 70%. Each app has an "official" price, lets say $9.99 or $10 to make the maths easier. If you purchase it, the developer gets $7. However, Apple doesn't always get $10. There have been student offers where you could buy a Mac and get $100 for store purchases, which means Apple gets nothing and pays $70 to developers. Plenty of people give gift cards for Christmas, and if you buy a $50 gift card from some store, that store is taking its (generous) cut and Apple doesn't get $50, but still pays $35 to developers. I always manage to stock up with gift cards purchased with 20% rebate, so for £50 official price software, music or books that I buy, the developers get £35, I paid only £40, so I don't think that Apple keeps 30% of that.
Now Apple's plan is not to make money from the stores (thought is just a welcome side effect), but to have good app stores to make you buy Macs and iPhones and iPads. Still, if Microsoft got say 80% of the "official" price, Apple might actually lose money on that.
So what's the difference with this situation? Why would he be opposed to VLC on iOS, but be fine with VLC on the Windows 8 store?
He probably wouldn't be fine. Unless the Windows 8 store terms are different (they might be different in some subtle way that makes all the difference), or unless Microsoft were willing to fight this in court (unlikely), or unless Microsoft makes an offer he cannot refuse. Or possibly if he gave up caring.
Personally, I think he was wrong. On the App Store, there can be two licenses in play: There is Apple's license, which allows you to do certain things, like making several copies for private use. The developer has to agree that you have the rights that this license gives you, otherwise you cannot go on the app store. Then there is whatever license the developer gave you. My interpretation is that you have the right to do anything that _either_ license allows you to do.
With that interpretation, any objections because Apple's license is restrictive would be void, because you could do whatever Apple doesn't allow due to the GPL license that you got as well. It would be a valid objection if Apple allowed to do things that GPL doesn't allow, like distributing unlimited copies without source code (if one of the copyright holders objects).
They even asked the UK to hold Assange in solitary confinement whilst he awaited the outcome of his extradition appeals (bear in mind, Assange still, to this day, has not been charged with anything so they were asking for solitary without even a charge being brought) but luckily British justice is at least not quite as backwards as in Sweden.
What you say is misleading. In some countries, charging you is the first step. In Sweden, it is the last step. Since "being charged" is something completely different in Sweden, it is just fine that he hasn't been charged yet.
I like how, in the previous RMS post to Slashdot, people were attacking him, even pointing out some disgusting behavior in the first few posts. It makes me wonder how many shill accounts exist just for this purpose, for Linux and FOSS articles a lot of the time sock puppets are the first to post and are usually OT and/or trolls.
The message is what matters, and in this matter I support what RMS has said.
So basically you are saying there are ad hominem attacks against Stallman. But that is not _quite_ the case. The principle of an ad hominem attack is this: I don't like the argument, and to refute it, I attack or belittle the person making the argument. It's different here: When a person eats their toe nails in public, many people just find that disgusting, and they don't actually care whether anything that person says is right or wrong. They just don't care. It's not that the argument is refuted, it is ignored. It is even ignored _after_ hearing it.
Three things I'd like to throw in here. First, you'd think that after a few dickish maneuvers of making source hard to get, someone that got the source from him would post it up somewhere so anyone could have it (whether or not they bought the author's binary) I suppose the author may try to go after you for some sort of copyright violation, but that would only go as far as he was willing to pay his lawyer to bog down a court in the mud for. (which, depending on his money to burn and determination, may be annoying or expensive enough for the poster to just give up on, losing to "unaffordable justice")
I think something is mixed up here. There is an original author, who distributed some software under a GPL license. There is a second player, who distributes either the original or a modified version, apparently under terms contrary to the GPL license. If the second player modified the code, or added code, then he is _also_ a copyright holder.
In that case you would need permission from the first author (which you have) and permission from the second author to distribute. If the second author doesn't give you permission and source code, then he commited copyright infringement against the first author. You still have no permission to copy his work.
So _if_ you make copies, you could be sued. It would be an interesting defense, because by suing you the second player _admits_ that they themselves committed copyright infringement.
gross violation of the GPL, report it to the EFF and the FSF immediately, they can and just might sue.
They can only sue if they are the copyright holder.
It seems to me that this is the fundamental problem with GPL, and some other, open source licenses; it all depends on the honor system. Sure, they are technically legally binding, but if nobody holds anybody's feet to the fire, that means nothing.
Your problem is that you don't understand how these licenses work. The copyright holder gave people permission to make copies, as long as they followed certain rules. This doesn't mean anyone, even the copyright holder, can force anyone to follow these rules. It means that anyone making copies without following the rules, or without having any other permission, commits copyright infringement, and the copyright holder can sue them for copyright infringement.
If you are not the copyright holder, you have no standing to sue.
Developers get 70% of the advertised price both on Google's store and on the AppStore. Which is a lot more than most get at Amazon, and more than anyone gets at any other store. At the AppStore developers have the advantage that lots of kids (and adults) will get gift cards for Christmas and will spend that money on iOS games.
"hurts the plaintiff in his or her profession or trade."
If the contractor did a good job and got an awful review, then the review hurt him. If the contractor did an awful job and received an awful but correct review, then I would argue that it was not the review that hurt them but the bad job that they did.
as exemplified by the infinite number of hits you get when googling "repair permissions", the universal remedy for all Mac problems (which are remarkably frequent for a faultless system) that never ever works, suggested by clueless idiots to helpless computer illiterate users every day
Background: Installing software mostly means putting lots of files in the right places, with the right access rights (permissions). Early MacOS X versions sometimes got that wrong. So Apple made installers that not only put files into the right places, with the right access rights (hopefully), but also added log files that described what access rights each file should have. So if something messed up these access rights, a tool could read the log files, check what access rights each file should have, and fix it if it was wrong.
All that was many years ago. Files don't tend to be installed with wrong access rights anymore. Software doesn't tend to modify these access rights on random files anymore. So "repair permissions" tends to do nothing at all in practice.
When your mother buys a printer and AirPrint happens to not work with it, she might ask you or anyone tech-knowledgable to make it work for her.
Since the iPhone has locked you out of doing anything that isn't Apple-certified, your only reply to her will be, buy a new printer. This time, make sure it has AirPrint support on the label.
And if you weren't "locked out", you would write a new printer driver? In your spare time?
Much more effective is to go with her back to the store, get a refund for the printer, and buy one that is AirPrint compatible.
It should be obvious that if nobody was allowed to have a gun, then gun packing criminals would be able to target anyone who doesn't look like an undercover police officer.
And if they did try that in the UK, that would be the quickest way to go to jail for a long time. Or in Germany, where committing a theft while being armed is automatically "armed robbery" with a severe sentence. (No use of the weapon, or intent of use, needed).
Also, if there is little or no market, there is little or no incentive to try to smuggle an item into a country. It is demand driven really. Why take tremendous risks just to increase your stockpile of items you can't sell ?
I few years ago a newspaper tried to investigate this and sent someone out to buy as many guns as they could in London. Within a few hours, not only had they bought several guns, but the news had spread that someone was trying to buy guns and the price had already doubled.
Since gun ownership is so low, committing a crime in the UK using a gun means every single cop is trying to get you. In other words, using a gun is a stupid move for a criminal.
Yes they can; by throwing one tenth of their $120 billion at the effort. I'd be happy to be part of it.
Let's do a calculation. The USA have about 4 million miles of road. Let's say you drive all the million miles at 20 mph, that's 200,000 hours. Two people in a car, 400,000 person hours, or 10,000 weekly salaries. It's not that a well paying job, say $1,000 per week or $10 million. To be generous, multiply this by 10 to get the total cost, that's $100 million. Less than 1% of what you are saying.
The solution: Apple needs to stop picking fights. I'm sure Google would have given them the full turn-by-turn system if Apple would have paid for it. Apple has great hardware and software engineers. But they aren't good enough to replicate the technology its competitor has spent over a decade developing in just one year.
Apple _was_ paying huge sums of money to Google for map data. They had the choice of continuing to pay to Google (which might have been a bad strategy, considering that for example Samsung doesn't seem to want to sell batteries to Apple anymore), or to do something about it. Short term pain, long term the right decision.
And mapping data is not "developed over a decade". It is developed, and then it is permanently updated. So starting from zero you are not _that_ far behind.
> Increasing yellow light times
Does reduce the amount of green light time, which decreases the number of cars that can pass through the intersection, which increases the traffic congestion, which increases the desire to run the red light...
That's actually not how it works.
Where I learned driving, the rules were like this: Green light means you can drive. Yellow light means you have to stop if it is safe to do so (and you don't stop if it is unsafe). Red light you stop - the traffic light needs to be set so that someone driving at the speed limit and too close to stop when the light turns yellow shouldn't see a read light.
The traffic light in the other directions must be set up so that if everyone follows these rules or violates them only slightly, everyone should be safe.
In the USA, it seems you get a speeding ticket if you are not through the crossing when the light turns red. And that opens time for manipulation: If you make the yellow phase shorter by a second, and the red phase longer by a second, keep green the same, then if everyone drives unchanged, the crossing is exacly as safe as ever, exactly the same amount of traffic gets through, but you get more tickets. "Best" case you make the yellow phase so short that it is impossible to get through the crossing before the light turns red, and everybody who reaches the traffic light just when it turns yellow has no chance to avoid a ticket.
Well, the solution to liability is legal - grant immunity as long as the car performs above some safety standard on the whole, and that standard can be raised as the industry progresses. There is no reason that somebody should be punished for making a car 10X safer than any car on the road today.
The problem is just that many people are bad at maths. The idea is that driverless vehicles, implemented properly, should reduce the total number of accidents, and reduce the number of accidents at any severity level. That means that total amount of damage is reduced.
Car owners do already need liability insurance - you have insurance, so whenever damage is caused by your car, the insurance pays out, and your premium goes up. Usually the damage will be caused by the owner, through carelessness, or a momentary lapse. Sometimes it is caused by someone else, like a thief stealing your car. It happens. So with driverless cars, you keep paying the insurance, except the premium goes down, because there is on average less damage. And if your car causes an accident with damage, your insurance pays just as it does now.
So if 40,000 die every year now, wouldn't insurance companies doing liability insurance have to pay out 40,000 times 8 million dollars = 320 billion dollars? So we are looking at 304 billion dollars saved every year?
The sad truth: How much people value something is proportional to what it costs them to get it. That principle applies in many areas of life. Geeks who give free computer support to friends and family know that. (My recommendation: Print a bill with a reasonable hourly rate, say £50 per hour, add a hundred percent rebate, and hand them the bill. Makes people a lot more polite if they realise that the next virus infection will cost them £100 if they don't behave well).
The same goes quite obvious for "Open Source" or more general, for "no payment" software. It costs nothing, so they have no respect for the developer.
They will still arrest you for, among other things, creating a disturbance, interfering with an officer, resisting arrest, mopery and dopery. ;)
And so you will still need a good lawyer.
The idea is that you record _secretly_. You know, where nobody notices. Especially the police.
Well, it would be a good idea for someone to create an iPhone app that streams video directly to the cloud, so no evidence can be destroyed.
Because Apple wants to drive Samsung out of the smartphone/tablet business. If HTC licensed the same patents for a reasonable price, Samsung would have some leverage to get the same deal and stay in the market.
There is of course the argument that if A uses patents illegally and gains a competitive advantage against B, then the patent holder would quite reasonably license the patent to B so we get better competition, and not ever license the patent to A.
Wouldn't the HTC settlement help Apple's case? If HTC will settle patent claims with Apple, why doesn't Samsung do so on similar terms? Why does Apple have to sue Samsung when Apple is this big reasonable company that just wants to cross-license its patent portfolio at a reasonable price?
Well, Apple doesn't _want_ to cross-license its patents. However, the fact is that Samsung used these patents without permission, and Samsung sales have gone up, while HTC sales have gone down. So here is what most likely happened:
Someone at the negotiation table said, look, HTC isn't really Apple's enemy, Samsung is. And Apple isn't really HTCs enemy, Samsung is. So much better to join forces, license these patents to HTC, and to Microsoft, and to anyone other than Samsung. And do their best to f*** Samsung together. Samsung shouldn't be too surprised if there will be some HTC lawsuits following.
You can say that it "unfair". You can say anything you like, but that does not make it so. However, when a company is taking advantage of a perfectly legal tax minimization plan, it is not fair to blame the company.
You are right, one shouldn't _blame_ the company. On the other hand, we _should_ grab them by the balls, squeeze hard, and extract any money we can.
If laws can be applied retroactively, they are not laws. When you apply laws retroactively, you are saying, "Yesterday, when you did that it was legal, but today we made it illegal, so we are going to punish you."
On the other hand, if a government does that, and the people in the country agree with it, then what is Amazon going to do?
And this is tax law. It's not "what you did was legal, and now we declare it legal". It's "everyone is supposed to pay a fair amount of taxes. We set up rules to calculate, as best as we could, the amount of fair taxes for everyone. You managed to set up things so that the taxes calculated by our rules were very much less than the fair amount of taxes. Now we fix this, and since you didn't pay a fair amount of taxes in the past, we fix it retroactively".
Someone was nice enough to post the original ruling. It seems that someone else used this exit node to illegally download some copyrighted work. The person running the exit node was found to be not the downloader, therefore no fine or anything, _but_ he was ordered to prevent further illegal downloading of copyrighted works by closing the node down.