But in five, ten, twenty years... The public will still expect new, more advanced cars, won't they? And who's going to build and manafacture them for free?
Piracy is the equivalent of stealing a car that duplicates itself when it gets stolen.
All my students got their degrees with the help of pirated software.
But in five, ten, twenty years... The public will still expect new, more advanced cars, won't they? And who's going to build and manafacture them for free?
Would it be right for him to manufacture counterfeit patented drugs? Yes of course! Except, no, because that devalues those drugs, jeopardising the drug company's revenue and threatening future research. At the very least, the availability of free versions, constricts the available market for the legitimate version, causing the producers to increase the price to cover the fixed cost of development. If you encourage counterfeiting your ultimate scenarios are either a two tier system, where some doctors have unlimited free drugs, and some have constrained expensive drugs, which is horribly unfair on patients, or a utopian free-for-all followed by a rapid collapse in the development of new treatments. If one or two guys quietly do this without a fuss, the end scenarios are unlikely to come true, although harm is still done. If people on the Internet, reaching audiences of millions actually vociferously advocate this kind of thing, then what's the stop it ending every badly for us all?
I do agree with you the max they should get is the 70% split of the sold work, if any compensation at all is received.
Don't be stupid, Apple pays out for this, then sues whoever submitted the apps/books for compensation. Simple legal processes taking place. Apple probably aren't troubled by this at all.
And if a company spends $500 million designing, developing and building that car, and after one person buys that car, and everyone else steals their own copy, how does the car builder get its money back for the design and production of that car? Pirating intellectual material may not deprive the owner of the material, but it does deprive the owner of the potential market for that material. Similarly, if everyone pirated books, then authors would make no money writing them, and before you know it, nobody would be writing books any more.Piracy is the equivalent of stealing a car that duplicates itself when it gets stolen.
And now there are two cars. The horror.
The biggest risk revolves around Apple being sued not for the content of the store, but for what that content was used for. Since everyone on this forum (well, at least one or two of you) loves car analogies, this is a bit like suing Chevrolet because one of its vehicles was used to commit a crime. Or a more precise analogy would be suing Amazon because the content of a book it sold contained material that its author had stolen from someone else's book.It sets a dangerous precedent. It means Apple are liable for the content on the store. That might be potentially workable since Apple approves all the content on the stores, but it exposes them to potentially huge damages should somebody upload something the reviewer doesn't immediately recognise as an infringement of somebody's IP.
There are decades of enforceable IP registered all over the world. It includes books and songs and movies and more, in every country those are protected. On the other hand, Apple can only realistically have so many reviewers.
The real danger here is to Google, who don't have an approval mechanism. There's a huge amount of IP infringement on the Play store.
The way Google tackles this at the moment is the same way they do with Youtube (see Viacom vs Youtube) - copyright holders have to notify the company and it will take the offending content down, but it isn't liable for any actual infringement that occurred. The case has had a bit of a back-and-forth, but most of the modern internet depends on that ruling essentially staying.
It sets a dangerous precedent. It means Apple are liable for the content on the store. That might be potentially workable since Apple approves all the content on the stores, but it exposes them to potentially huge damages should somebody upload something the reviewer doesn't immediately recognise as an infringement of somebody's IP.
There are two ways to fix this: One is by not having excessive penalties or having no penalties at all - in this case it is clear that Apple had not intended to infringe anyone's copyright but was tricked into doing so. Penalties should only be applied to the scammers who submitted someone else's work. The other is for Apple (or anyone in a similar position) to make sure that they know who they are dealing with, so if anything goes wrong they have someone to take to court as well.
I actually thought that this was the whole point of the iPhone developer program - that if your app is malicious, Apple can use the card you paid the developer fee with to identify you.
I'm not sure why they're not handing over the addresses of the developers and asking the rights holders to sort it out with them (or maybe they did and the Chinese court just didn't accept that).
In a country where I live, for $1 you could buy a 1 litre bottle of beer.
For $100, you could buy 100 bottles, or 5 boxes of beer.
I cannot imagine that someone would follow your advice.