You didn't get it, right? Someone is using your phone for a 911-call. And you are left with a $100 bill for each call. And none of your acquaintances will tell you who placed the call. Who do you sue?
The calls are recorded. Surely you will be able to get a recording of the call. Also, there's not a $100 fine for owning a phone from which a call is made, but for making a call. The call coming from your phone is a strong indication that you made the call, but not conclusive proof.
So they will have a recording of the call, a witness who will testify that it is your voice and you had access to the phone, so you are getting the fine, plus there will be criminal charges now because you intentionally did this to run up a bill for your acquaintance. There might be more consequences. You might work for a company that needs reliable employees, and that kind of stunt clearly demonstrates that you cannot be trusted.
I think it is a well-known indicator for criminality that a person cannot consider future consequences of their actions. You seem to be an excellent example of that.
Because that would make the prank of calling 911 from your acquaintance's phone just more fun. And maybe call it several times. And then don't tell anyone who did the actual call.
It would make it more fun for a short time, and a serious crime. You'd also run out of acquaintances rather quickly. Some of them would meet you again in a dark corner and give you some life lessons.
That's missing the point of this which is discrete and customisable. When someone is pointing a gun at you shouting "emergency call" at Siri probably isn't the best course of action.
"A photo of you has just been sent to a place where the police will be able to get it if anything happens to me". Sure the guy is annoyed, but annoyed enough to go to jail for murder when he _knows_ he is going to be caught?
The article is really about a "Panic" button, not a 911 call. A "Panic" button that would automatically start sending live sound and continuous high res photos to a safe server, for example one owned by Apple / Google. Using both cameras if you have one on each side. So if you or someone else gets into trouble, with criminals or otherwise, there is undestructible evidence of it, and the criminals know it. Or if you think the police is doing something wrong, taking away your phone won't help them.
" Another man, who spoke to journalists but chose to remain anonymous to prevent further harassment, says he was stopped more than 25 times by police under a variety of pretences after he had attended a peaceful local protest against duck and pheasant shooting. He finally made a formal complaint after police armed with machine guns pulled him over during an evening out with his wife."
Take two scenarios: Police records all known locations of the car of the "duck and pheasant shooting protestor". When a "duck and pheasant shooter"s house is burnt down, they find that the protester has been near that house repeatedly and he becomes an arson suspect.
And scenario two: "Duck and pheasant shooting" protester is stopped 25 times, including by police with machine guns.
The second one is clearly unacceptable. The first one? I don't know.
Yeah...why not make kill switches for stolen cars, stolen boats, stolen purses, stolen wallets, stolen credit cards, stolen sandwiches, etc.? This is stupid.
We have kill switches for stolen credit cards. Purses, wallets, sandwiches would pose some substantial technical challenges. With cars and boats it's all up to the numbers, and again a kill switch that nobody can get around would be harder to implement.
I don't want to bother RTFA, so can someone tell me- in this future, will the user (cough *owner*) of the hardware have the option of disabling this functionality? Perhaps with some long code the user files away if they ever want to disable it, or throws away/shreds if they plan on never disabling it (and preventing all future owners from being able to disable it)?
That would be counter productive. The reason for the kill switch is not to annoy thieves, it is so that thieves _know_ the phone cannot be used before they even steal it, so they stop stealing (and also, stop hurting people in the process). Every time someone doesn't do this and walks around with a phone without kill switch, thieves know there are still phones out there worth stealing.
Have you even read the damned article? All they're bitching about is to make Find my iphone to default to on (ie, opt out instead of opt in).
"Kill switch" is something stronger and much more inconvenient. Your phone gets lost behind the sofa and the battery runs out. You think it's stolen and call somewhere to have the kill switch activated. Next day, you find your phone and it's bricked. That's very, very inconvenient.
The reason is this: the only way to do a "kill switch" reliably, which can't be bypassed, is to truly brick the phone, beyond repair. Anything else, and hack solutions to un-brick would be available for free in 2 weeks.
You can't use a locked iPhone with iOS 7. That's for more than two weeks now, and I haven't seen any way to get around that yet.
Nah, it's just regular cryptography. The definition of DRM requires that the owner of the data and the attacker be the same entity.
DRM = Digital Rights Management. If I download videos or audiobooks with DRM, I have rights to use them, and the DRM controls these rights. My rights, not the rights of the movie or book company. So does this software. It controls _my_ rights to access the data. The only difference is that one makes sure I don't exceed my rights, while the other makes sure I can't execute my rights without paying ransom.
DavidGilbert99, please fix your damn article. You wrote the article, you wrote the summary, both with attention-getting headlines. And they both passed different sets of editors (assuming the editors even exist) and they are both incorrect with the $30M figure.
The article that got linked now correctly says $300,000.
It also shows the value of a solution like Time Machine, which keeps older versions of files around for a long time.
When claiming under manufacturer's warranty your first recourse is the place you bought it from and *they* have to go through the hassle of fighting with the manufacturer (though PC World tried to dodge that when I had a faulty Transformer). However, the seller has to fulfill the conditions to the buyer then and there, making it like a charge back on a card.
If you buy an Apple product in the UK, you have about the same rights both under manufacturer's warranty and statutory rights for six months. The next six months the manufacturer's warranty is better for you, and from then on you only have statutory rights.
As long as you are protected by both, you have the choice to claim either against the seller or the manufacturer, whatever suits you better. Neither of them has the right to pass you on to the other.
And no, there is no manufacturer's warranty codified anywhere. For most products that you buy, you have no idea who the manufacturer is, and if you did know, you would have no way of forcing them to do anything. That's why the sole legal responsibility is with the seller, because you know the seller, you went there once to buy the goods so they are usually near enough to go there again with complaints. The seller may have a contract with the manufacturer so they are not stuck with the cost, but that's of no interest to the customer.
When you mention Dell, the Italians were quite upset that Apple doesn't make your statutory rights clear enough when selling extended warranties. And they _do_ tell you about them, but apparently it's not clear enough. Dell does no such thing. They sell you two years extended warranty without mentioning statutory rights at all, which is exactly what the Italians complained about with Apple.
This is about requiring manufacturers to take responsibility for selling faulty products.
See, you are mixing it up, like so many do. Manufacturers don't sell you goods. Retailers sell goods. Apple manufactures goods and gives warranties. There are no laws that say anything about the warranties that a manufacturer should give. Various retailers sell goods made by Apple and many others. Sometimes Apple is itself a retailer, selling products made by Apple and others. The _retailer_ is responsible for selling faulty products.
In the EU warranty is 2 years by law, and Apple sticked to it if you "complained" but did the same thing as in Australia: thy misslead customers to believe that warranty was only one year.
You are saying that, but it's not true. Both in the EU (most of the EU, some countries are different), and Australia, there is nothing in any law that says two years. It says "reasonable time".
Importantly, by using the word "warranty" you are just confusing things. There are two totally separate things: One is warranty. The manufacturer, or anyone else, gives you entirely voluntary some kind of warranty (obviously the warranty influences what I buy, but there is no law whatsoever that forces them). The other is "statutory rights". When you buy something, the seller (not the manufacturer) is responsible that the item is of reasonable quality, does what it is supposed to do, and works for a reasonable time. That's totally separate. So no, Apple as the maker of a computer or phone or tablet doesn't have to give you any warranty whatsoever. On the other hand, if you buy directly from Apple, or from an Apple store, the store has legal responsibilities - whether the product you buy is made by Apple or not.
What's interesting is that these laws apply to _any_ store, and I've never seen any store in the UK actually telling me about consumer rights, and only Apple is ever told off for this. Dell for example doesn't tell you _anything_ about your consumer rights. And unlike Apple, Dell is _always_ the seller, so they are _always_ responsible for statutory rights.
The article used a virtual machine which required privilege to install, and then called it "firmware modified from user space", but actually it was "firmware modified from user space by first escalating privilege".
No, they had two attacks. One involved a VM, but the VM had to have permission to access the camera in the first place, which VMs usually don't have. The other involved running an untrusted program. Programs coming through the app store would usually not be able to do this because they don't have appropriate access (and if they have access to the camera, they would hopefully be reviewed more carefully, plus the deed falls fully into anti-hacking laws that would put you into jail if found out).
The author of the article also developed a kernel extension which prevents all of this unless an app has root privileges, and if you have malware with root privileges, you have lost anyway.
When the people keep making the same bad decisions, you should consider the possibility that it is not just stupidity. Did we not learn a short time ago that agents were planted in companies like this to make back doors? Sure, no evidence or court cases yet... But see. Y first sentence.
No evidence yet. Not "no proof yet", but no evidence yet. In other words, baseless rumours.
... and don't forget "searching very very hard" is an euphemism for "fabricating"â¦
I didn't use "searching very very hard" as such a euphemism, but obviously it's a possibility to consider. If you consider the possibility, you then need to consider whether the police would do that to convict someone, anyone, or only in a case where they are honestly convinced they have the perpetrator.
It would be nice to have an explanation of when a copy goes out of copyright and how that effects other copies and originals.
Copyright applies to the original and all the copies. If someone doesn't make a copy but creates a modified work, that new creator would have the copyright on their changes, but the unmodified parts would still be under the original copyright. If copyright for the original expires, then all unmodified copies are free, all copies where modifications are so small that they don't create new rights are free as well.
And, just because someone tried this, converting to a different audio format doesn't affect copyright (Some joker once tried to claim that he created.mp3 files that sounded the same but were actually totally different from the originals, so these.mp3 files were solely under _his_ copyright. I don't know if the judge thought it was a good joke or a bad joke).
1. As mentioned, it is "Apple Corps", the company owned by the Beatles, that put the music on the music store by "Apple Inc", which allows people to buy this music if they wish to, or not buy it if they don't wish to.
2. Apple Corps has 70 years copyright on all published music by the Beatles. As a quirk in British law, unpublished music only has 50 years copyright. That's different from US law, where the clock starts running when the music gets published, so the same songs according to US law would have infinite copyright protection, being not published at all.
3. So people here get all excited because Apple Corps made a tactical move to get the same copyright on this music as on all the other music, where in the USA they would actually have had much longer copyright.
4. Remember: With this move, you can actually get this music now, where before you couldn't. The only ones hurt by this is anybody who somehow had illegal copies of this music in their possession, and hoped to cash in when copyright runs out.
The evidence itself was completely circumstantial. Without a confession they surely had nothing.
They had no way to prove anything other than:
1. Guerilla Mail was accessed by Tor to send the e-mails.
2. Kim is a Harvard student that recently accessed Tor.
Enough to get a search warrant. So what do you think would a search warrant have shown? Fact is: If you did it, then there is evidence. And if the police thinks you did it, and the case is important enough to search very, very hard, they will find the evidence.
... to use TOR, but then gave a full confession during an "interview", throwing his right to remain silent (and to have a lawyer present during questioning) out the window?
We can assume that someone who needs to avoid a test isn't the brightest spark. We can assume that someone who sends a bomb threat to avoid a test is reckless and stupid. We can assume that if someone who is reckless and stupid mails in a bomb threat, and his identity is discovered, then there _will_ be evidence. For example, they had easily enough to get a search warrant for his computer. What are the odds that there is evidence, like a draft of the email, on his computer? Remember: This is not an evil genius trying to disrupt US universities, it is a reckless idiot trying to get out of an exam.
Nobody has been deprived of anything, it's a copy, the originals still exist.
But that's not what it is about. The film company said they were willing to sell a license to make unlimited free copies of the film for $650,000. He made unlimited free copies of the film without a license. So now he has to pay for the license.
Theft is defined (at least here) as taking someone's property with the intention of permanently depriving them of it.
Nobody has been deprived of anything, it's a copy, the originals still exist.
For example, that's not how theft is defined in Germany. In Germany it is "with the intent to enrich yourself". Depriving the other is no part of it. And clearly by making an illegal copy you are enriching yourself.
However, it isn't theft at all because theft is only about actual physical objects. But then if you read the actual article, the movie company said "we would have sold him a license to give away free copies of this movie for $650,000. He could have bought that license. Instead he gave away these free copies, illegally, without a license. Damages should put the injured party into the same position as if he hadn't acted illegally, so basically force him to buy this license".
Your other points, I think there was some rather clear evidence that he distributed the movie and over 500 others.
But it is no wonder companies have so much anymosity towards employees when they pick the busiest time of the year to stop work. It completely smacks of the we want to hurt you vibe that is generally met with hostile return. I bet someone is attempting to find ways to fire the lot of the strikers without violating law.
Of course that's exactly what is intended. The company hurts its employees in their wage packets. Do you think they are happy about that? The company is blatantly lying about their business to avoid paying higher wages, so do you think the employees are happy about that?
Unions are ridiculously powerful in the US, and even more so in Europe. Employers who deal with unions have to have union approval for practically anything they do, so every business decision turns into an adversarial conflict. Businesses often just avoid changes, just to avoid having the unions add more requirements.
You are talking about Germany here. Business decisions don't have to turn into conflict at all, if you have some basic respect for the employees on one side, and understand the basic principle that the company must be profitable to keep running on the other side. German employees and businesses have that. US companies often don't, so they run into trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't get it, right? Someone is using your phone for a 911-call. And you are left with a $100 bill for each call. And none of your acquaintances will tell you who placed the call. Who do you sue?
The calls are recorded. Surely you will be able to get a recording of the call. Also, there's not a $100 fine for owning a phone from which a call is made, but for making a call. The call coming from your phone is a strong indication that you made the call, but not conclusive proof.
So they will have a recording of the call, a witness who will testify that it is your voice and you had access to the phone, so you are getting the fine, plus there will be criminal charges now because you intentionally did this to run up a bill for your acquaintance. There might be more consequences. You might work for a company that needs reliable employees, and that kind of stunt clearly demonstrates that you cannot be trusted.
I think it is a well-known indicator for criminality that a person cannot consider future consequences of their actions. You seem to be an excellent example of that.
Because that would make the prank of calling 911 from your acquaintance's phone just more fun. And maybe call it several times. And then don't tell anyone who did the actual call.
It would make it more fun for a short time, and a serious crime. You'd also run out of acquaintances rather quickly. Some of them would meet you again in a dark corner and give you some life lessons.
That's missing the point of this which is discrete and customisable. When someone is pointing a gun at you shouting "emergency call" at Siri probably isn't the best course of action.
"A photo of you has just been sent to a place where the police will be able to get it if anything happens to me". Sure the guy is annoyed, but annoyed enough to go to jail for murder when he _knows_ he is going to be caught?
The article is really about a "Panic" button, not a 911 call. A "Panic" button that would automatically start sending live sound and continuous high res photos to a safe server, for example one owned by Apple / Google. Using both cameras if you have one on each side. So if you or someone else gets into trouble, with criminals or otherwise, there is undestructible evidence of it, and the criminals know it. Or if you think the police is doing something wrong, taking away your phone won't help them.
" Another man, who spoke to journalists but chose to remain anonymous to prevent further harassment, says he was stopped more than 25 times by police under a variety of pretences after he had attended a peaceful local protest against duck and pheasant shooting. He finally made a formal complaint after police armed with machine guns pulled him over during an evening out with his wife."
Take two scenarios: Police records all known locations of the car of the "duck and pheasant shooting protestor". When a "duck and pheasant shooter"s house is burnt down, they find that the protester has been near that house repeatedly and he becomes an arson suspect.
And scenario two: "Duck and pheasant shooting" protester is stopped 25 times, including by police with machine guns.
The second one is clearly unacceptable. The first one? I don't know.
Yeah...why not make kill switches for stolen cars, stolen boats, stolen purses, stolen wallets, stolen credit cards, stolen sandwiches, etc.? This is stupid.
We have kill switches for stolen credit cards. Purses, wallets, sandwiches would pose some substantial technical challenges. With cars and boats it's all up to the numbers, and again a kill switch that nobody can get around would be harder to implement.
I don't want to bother RTFA, so can someone tell me- in this future, will the user (cough *owner*) of the hardware have the option of disabling this functionality? Perhaps with some long code the user files away if they ever want to disable it, or throws away/shreds if they plan on never disabling it (and preventing all future owners from being able to disable it)?
That would be counter productive. The reason for the kill switch is not to annoy thieves, it is so that thieves _know_ the phone cannot be used before they even steal it, so they stop stealing (and also, stop hurting people in the process). Every time someone doesn't do this and walks around with a phone without kill switch, thieves know there are still phones out there worth stealing.
Have you even read the damned article? All they're bitching about is to make Find my iphone to default to on (ie, opt out instead of opt in).
"Kill switch" is something stronger and much more inconvenient. Your phone gets lost behind the sofa and the battery runs out. You think it's stolen and call somewhere to have the kill switch activated. Next day, you find your phone and it's bricked. That's very, very inconvenient.
The reason is this: the only way to do a "kill switch" reliably, which can't be bypassed, is to truly brick the phone, beyond repair. Anything else, and hack solutions to un-brick would be available for free in 2 weeks.
You can't use a locked iPhone with iOS 7. That's for more than two weeks now, and I haven't seen any way to get around that yet.
Nah, it's just regular cryptography. The definition of DRM requires that the owner of the data and the attacker be the same entity.
DRM = Digital Rights Management. If I download videos or audiobooks with DRM, I have rights to use them, and the DRM controls these rights. My rights, not the rights of the movie or book company. So does this software. It controls _my_ rights to access the data. The only difference is that one makes sure I don't exceed my rights, while the other makes sure I can't execute my rights without paying ransom.
DavidGilbert99, please fix your damn article. You wrote the article, you wrote the summary, both with attention-getting headlines. And they both passed different sets of editors (assuming the editors even exist) and they are both incorrect with the $30M figure.
The article that got linked now correctly says $300,000.
It also shows the value of a solution like Time Machine, which keeps older versions of files around for a long time.
When claiming under manufacturer's warranty your first recourse is the place you bought it from and *they* have to go through the hassle of fighting with the manufacturer (though PC World tried to dodge that when I had a faulty Transformer). However, the seller has to fulfill the conditions to the buyer then and there, making it like a charge back on a card.
If you buy an Apple product in the UK, you have about the same rights both under manufacturer's warranty and statutory rights for six months. The next six months the manufacturer's warranty is better for you, and from then on you only have statutory rights.
As long as you are protected by both, you have the choice to claim either against the seller or the manufacturer, whatever suits you better. Neither of them has the right to pass you on to the other.
And no, there is no manufacturer's warranty codified anywhere. For most products that you buy, you have no idea who the manufacturer is, and if you did know, you would have no way of forcing them to do anything. That's why the sole legal responsibility is with the seller, because you know the seller, you went there once to buy the goods so they are usually near enough to go there again with complaints. The seller may have a contract with the manufacturer so they are not stuck with the cost, but that's of no interest to the customer.
When you mention Dell, the Italians were quite upset that Apple doesn't make your statutory rights clear enough when selling extended warranties. And they _do_ tell you about them, but apparently it's not clear enough. Dell does no such thing. They sell you two years extended warranty without mentioning statutory rights at all, which is exactly what the Italians complained about with Apple.
This is about requiring manufacturers to take responsibility for selling faulty products.
See, you are mixing it up, like so many do. Manufacturers don't sell you goods. Retailers sell goods. Apple manufactures goods and gives warranties. There are no laws that say anything about the warranties that a manufacturer should give. Various retailers sell goods made by Apple and many others. Sometimes Apple is itself a retailer, selling products made by Apple and others. The _retailer_ is responsible for selling faulty products.
In the EU warranty is 2 years by law, and Apple sticked to it if you "complained" but did the same thing as in Australia: thy misslead customers to believe that warranty was only one year.
You are saying that, but it's not true. Both in the EU (most of the EU, some countries are different), and Australia, there is nothing in any law that says two years. It says "reasonable time".
Importantly, by using the word "warranty" you are just confusing things. There are two totally separate things: One is warranty. The manufacturer, or anyone else, gives you entirely voluntary some kind of warranty (obviously the warranty influences what I buy, but there is no law whatsoever that forces them). The other is "statutory rights". When you buy something, the seller (not the manufacturer) is responsible that the item is of reasonable quality, does what it is supposed to do, and works for a reasonable time. That's totally separate. So no, Apple as the maker of a computer or phone or tablet doesn't have to give you any warranty whatsoever. On the other hand, if you buy directly from Apple, or from an Apple store, the store has legal responsibilities - whether the product you buy is made by Apple or not.
What's interesting is that these laws apply to _any_ store, and I've never seen any store in the UK actually telling me about consumer rights, and only Apple is ever told off for this. Dell for example doesn't tell you _anything_ about your consumer rights. And unlike Apple, Dell is _always_ the seller, so they are _always_ responsible for statutory rights.
The article used a virtual machine which required privilege to install, and then called it "firmware modified from user space", but actually it was "firmware modified from user space by first escalating privilege".
No, they had two attacks. One involved a VM, but the VM had to have permission to access the camera in the first place, which VMs usually don't have. The other involved running an untrusted program. Programs coming through the app store would usually not be able to do this because they don't have appropriate access (and if they have access to the camera, they would hopefully be reviewed more carefully, plus the deed falls fully into anti-hacking laws that would put you into jail if found out).
The author of the article also developed a kernel extension which prevents all of this unless an app has root privileges, and if you have malware with root privileges, you have lost anyway.
When the people keep making the same bad decisions, you should consider the possibility that it is not just stupidity. Did we not learn a short time ago that agents were planted in companies like this to make back doors? Sure, no evidence or court cases yet... But see. Y first sentence.
No evidence yet. Not "no proof yet", but no evidence yet. In other words, baseless rumours.
... and don't forget "searching very very hard" is an euphemism for "fabricating"â¦
I didn't use "searching very very hard" as such a euphemism, but obviously it's a possibility to consider. If you consider the possibility, you then need to consider whether the police would do that to convict someone, anyone, or only in a case where they are honestly convinced they have the perpetrator.
It would be nice to have an explanation of when a copy goes out of copyright and how that effects other copies and originals.
Copyright applies to the original and all the copies. If someone doesn't make a copy but creates a modified work, that new creator would have the copyright on their changes, but the unmodified parts would still be under the original copyright. If copyright for the original expires, then all unmodified copies are free, all copies where modifications are so small that they don't create new rights are free as well.
.mp3 files that sounded the same but were actually totally different from the originals, so these .mp3 files were solely under _his_ copyright. I don't know if the judge thought it was a good joke or a bad joke).
And, just because someone tried this, converting to a different audio format doesn't affect copyright (Some joker once tried to claim that he created
1. As mentioned, it is "Apple Corps", the company owned by the Beatles, that put the music on the music store by "Apple Inc", which allows people to buy this music if they wish to, or not buy it if they don't wish to.
2. Apple Corps has 70 years copyright on all published music by the Beatles. As a quirk in British law, unpublished music only has 50 years copyright. That's different from US law, where the clock starts running when the music gets published, so the same songs according to US law would have infinite copyright protection, being not published at all.
3. So people here get all excited because Apple Corps made a tactical move to get the same copyright on this music as on all the other music, where in the USA they would actually have had much longer copyright.
4. Remember: With this move, you can actually get this music now, where before you couldn't. The only ones hurt by this is anybody who somehow had illegal copies of this music in their possession, and hoped to cash in when copyright runs out.
The evidence itself was completely circumstantial. Without a confession they surely had nothing.
They had no way to prove anything other than:
1. Guerilla Mail was accessed by Tor to send the e-mails.
2. Kim is a Harvard student that recently accessed Tor.
Enough to get a search warrant. So what do you think would a search warrant have shown? Fact is: If you did it, then there is evidence. And if the police thinks you did it, and the case is important enough to search very, very hard, they will find the evidence.
... to use TOR, but then gave a full confession during an "interview", throwing his right to remain silent (and to have a lawyer present during questioning) out the window?
We can assume that someone who needs to avoid a test isn't the brightest spark. We can assume that someone who sends a bomb threat to avoid a test is reckless and stupid. We can assume that if someone who is reckless and stupid mails in a bomb threat, and his identity is discovered, then there _will_ be evidence. For example, they had easily enough to get a search warrant for his computer. What are the odds that there is evidence, like a draft of the email, on his computer? Remember: This is not an evil genius trying to disrupt US universities, it is a reckless idiot trying to get out of an exam.
Nobody has been deprived of anything, it's a copy, the originals still exist.
But that's not what it is about. The film company said they were willing to sell a license to make unlimited free copies of the film for $650,000. He made unlimited free copies of the film without a license. So now he has to pay for the license.
Theft is defined (at least here) as taking someone's property with the intention of permanently depriving them of it.
Nobody has been deprived of anything, it's a copy, the originals still exist.
For example, that's not how theft is defined in Germany. In Germany it is "with the intent to enrich yourself". Depriving the other is no part of it. And clearly by making an illegal copy you are enriching yourself.
However, it isn't theft at all because theft is only about actual physical objects. But then if you read the actual article, the movie company said "we would have sold him a license to give away free copies of this movie for $650,000. He could have bought that license. Instead he gave away these free copies, illegally, without a license. Damages should put the injured party into the same position as if he hadn't acted illegally, so basically force him to buy this license".
Your other points, I think there was some rather clear evidence that he distributed the movie and over 500 others.
But it is no wonder companies have so much anymosity towards employees when they pick the busiest time of the year to stop work. It completely smacks of the we want to hurt you vibe that is generally met with hostile return. I bet someone is attempting to find ways to fire the lot of the strikers without violating law.
Of course that's exactly what is intended. The company hurts its employees in their wage packets. Do you think they are happy about that? The company is blatantly lying about their business to avoid paying higher wages, so do you think the employees are happy about that?
Unions are ridiculously powerful in the US, and even more so in Europe. Employers who deal with unions have to have union approval for practically anything they do, so every business decision turns into an adversarial conflict. Businesses often just avoid changes, just to avoid having the unions add more requirements.
You are talking about Germany here. Business decisions don't have to turn into conflict at all, if you have some basic respect for the employees on one side, and understand the basic principle that the company must be profitable to keep running on the other side. German employees and businesses have that. US companies often don't, so they run into trouble.