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Copyright, fair use, and unofficial music videos
Posts
I mean, it took Apple nearly a decade to make iTunes not a buggy mess (Now it's just bloated beyond belief), and as they say, never attribute to malice what one can attribute to incompetence.
That has been the mode of operation for all of them, for as long as digital media has been a thing.
Malice is actively seeking to harm others for its own sake. Greed is just amorality, the default state of corporations.
And?
Fines are generally punitive to discourage offence, not malicious.
Especially when it comes to Apple who's products tend to break over your knee when you try and do something that doesn't match their narrow range of expect/desired user behaviour.
Punitive and malice can be dangerously close cousins. That reward is larger than the median wrongful death tort, which suggests that downloading 2 CDs is literally worse than taking a human life. I would, ever so humbly, propose it is not, and thus, we cannot justify that penalty (or alternatively need to pump wrongful death penalties, but OTOH, any penalty amount that cannot be collected is really meaningless.
No, it suggests the truth: that the US system for awarding penalties in these kind of cases is all kinds of fucked up because the amount awarded can be all over the place depending on who gets to decide it and gets appealed and changed at multiple levels. I mean fuck, this case had the numbers reduced and then appealed like 3 times by judges and the record labels respectively and was all over the fucking place from what I can find on the case. Which all basically means making that kind of comparison is rather pointless. God knows how the numbers actually shake out in the ends on these things.
The larger point though is you can look at these numbers and just say generally "That's big, and certainly more then the songs were worth". Which is true. But, again, punitive fines work like that. It's not malice, it's an attempt to discourage the behaviour because while you may not get caught, if you do it's gonna hurt. You see it in government fines all the time.