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Japanese game publisher Digital Will has filed a lawsuit against Apple

144 points by mikece 3y ago

HumblyTossed 3y ago
> Since the developer had no idea what it was supposed to have done wrong, it was unable to meet Apple’s appeal requirement of explaining what happened, and how it has resolved the issue. The appeal was thus denied. If nothing else, Apple should fix this. There is ZERO reason to be anything other than 100% transparent.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  There is ZERO reason to be anything other than 100% transparent. The customary rationale, at least around here, goes something like "B...b...b...but if we actually document the rules and tell you what you did wrong, it helps the BAD GUYS!!!11!!"
  - ungruntled 3y ago
    I agree. Imagine a legal system where the laws are hidden from citizens and they are only informed of their guilt without meaningful appeal. I feel that any severed contract should require a clear reason with evidence along with an real opportunity for a rebuttal. If that fails then the court system can handle the rest. I used to believe that companies should be allowed to halt business with whomever they please, but this is really just being abused by large companies to avoid the costs of scaling their business.
    - layer8 3y ago
      > Imagine a legal system where the laws are hidden from citizens and they are only informed of their guilt without meaningful appeal. That’s almost the definition of kafkaesque.
    - miohtama 3y ago
      This is how anti-money laundering laws, bank account closures and money freeze work. Any compliance officer, as long as they follow the rulebook, can decide to freeze your account on mere suspicion. How the law is written, they do not need to justify their actions any way, there is no lower threshold for suspicious activity, where a suspicion can be anything. To make matter more complex, compliance staff members, or anyone, are not allowed to tell about this to the customer because of “tip off” risk. In fact it is a criminal act to tip off money launderers. Any freeze can last as long as is needed for “investigation” which does not need to be an investigation by authorities. And oh boy, this gets abused.
  - donmcronald 3y ago
    I think the app store monopoly is literally the thing that lets the bad guys participate in the first place. Consider competing app stores. Some of them would be stricter than Apple and do a far better job of curation IMO. For example, apps that exist to trick children into in-app purchases could be forbidden. Or maybe someone would start a store for games that only allows up-front sales, no subscriptions, and no ads. I would gravitate to those stores and it’s where I’d send everyone I know. If others did the same, the “specialty” stores would filter out a huge amount of junk that’s currently on the Apple app store. Maybe the market would even shrink by eliminating the low quality participants. How do you run an app store filled with garbage if there’s suddenly competition? IMO, that’s what Apple and Google are scared of. They want to keep selling large volumes of junk and competition makes that harder.
    - LordDragonfang 3y ago
      > Or maybe someone would start a store for games that only allows up-front sales, no subscriptions, and no ads. [...] [Those] stores would filter out a huge amount of junk that’s currently on the Apple app store. While I'd love to live in a universe where this could actually happen, in reality this is a pipe dream. The reason the app store is full of freemium apps stuffed with ads and microtransactions is because that's overwhelmingly the thing that consumers choose, and what makes the most money. Even desktop, a market that has historically used the up-front model is starting to switch to the "freemium or SaaS" model. Any app store that tried to have such principles would find that they get almost no devs willing to add their apps, and those that did would get barely any sales compared to their less scrupulous peers (rendering the store unable to stay solvent at worst, or having almost no effect on the wider market at best)
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        > The reason the app store is full of freemium apps stuffed with ads and microtransactions is because that's overwhelmingly the thing that consumers choose But that's the problem with a generalist store. They're leaving too much money on the table to exclude those things, so they include them, and then the store is full of crap and you can't trust anything. If anyone could start a store then you could have a store operated by a tiny startup with low overhead who only has to pay one or two salaries and can therefore be sustainable with only a tiny fraction of the market, because they have a niche. Which enables the quality store to exist, and serve all of the customers who prefer that.
  - 6510 3y ago
    I've been silently thinking that anyone who agrees to those terms is a traitor. Promoters of unethical business practices. Willing slaves? Why do people accept these terms?
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  Apple business practices are a trade secret. If they disclose them to this developer, they'd lose their presumed advantage in the market. Most large companies explain this somewhere in their terms of service, like Amazon using their own proprietary mechanisms for determining what fraud is.
  - donmcronald 3y ago
    > Apple business practices are a trade secret. If they disclose them to this developer, they'd lose their presumed advantage in the market. Their advantage is owning the locked down platform. It’s not a secret.
- programmarchy 3y ago
  Ignorantia juris non excusat.
  - frumper 3y ago
    That implies someone can learn what the rules are. Apple is capricious in the enforcement of those overly vague rules.
    - programmarchy 3y ago
      https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ We don't know all the facts yet, but there's one surefire way to get terminated: > If you attempt to cheat the system (for example, by trying to trick the review process, steal user data, copy another developer’s work, manipulate ratings or App Store discovery) your apps will be removed from the store and you will be expelled from the Apple Developer Program.
      - uhhhhhhh 3y ago
        Considering they engaged legal representation and it sounds like Apple rather than fight it restored their account. So we can probably safely assume it wasn't a glaringly obvious or serious breach of the terms that Apple felt it could defend. I don't imagine Apple would make cost benefit decisions about who can break their terms of service with nothing more than a letter with a legal letterhead. That being said we will know for sure as the plaintiff seems to be bound to make Apple foot the legal bill one way or another. Good for them.
        BizarroLand 3y ago
        I bet what happened is that one of Apples internal qualia changed and caused them to flag this developer, and no human being with any ability to fix things ever actually took a look at what happened until the lawsuit was filed and Apple was at risk of actually losing money because of it. I hope they get a multiplier on their damages. $725,000 for 4 months of downtime for 7 people doesn't seem like enough.
Terretta 3y ago
> anti-trust Anti whose trust?* Apple targets users' trust. If you count up news headlines for your statistics, you may end up biased on the utility a platform provides to end users by shutting down fraudulent dev accounts and erring on the side of caution. Because there are "think of the innocents" headlines when a small dev gets caught in the dragnet, but no headlines about the hordes constantly getting shutdown before more consumers are harmed. The ratio of reporting gives a false impression of the utility. Instead of looking for stories of bad devs getting shut down, you will find plenty pearl clutching headlines castigating Apple for failing to "clean up the app store" (although again, with no denominator under the numerator). In general, though, from the conception of the Mac as a "bicycle for the mind" to the last revamp into Apple-as-a-Service, Apple's platform is, and has always been, for everyday end users, not for devs. It's increasingly difficult to keep it safe for everyday users, and that's pain borne both by the platform creator, and app creators, so that users can do their jobs to be done with less friction, worry, or risk. (See IAP subs vs. any subscription to any other online service, effectively un-cancelable.) If one doesn't agree with that goal, and the costs of maintaining that goal, there are other platforms one can develop for. Meanwhile, 99% of apps, especially ad-supported apps, can be delivered through HTML5: https://developer.ibm.com/tutorials/x-html5mobile3/ https://developer.ibm.com/tutorials/x-html5mobile3/ All that said ... Devs are a user persona too, and Apple can afford to take accountability for any "we're in this together"-driven policy errors. TL;DR: Apple should automatically and proactively make-good any losses caused by mistaken shutdowns. They have the stats: recurring revenue + projected growth + inconvenience/opportunity-cost coverage, auto-deposited for duration. That would be a fine motivation to get better at discriminating on the margins. Would show user trust is important, and dev trust is of value too. - - - * Should have gone without saying: “Anti-trust” is not synonymous with “anti trust”, this was just a hook to talk about trust.
- thrown1212 3y ago
  Anti-trust not anti trust
  - Terretta 3y ago
    Of course. That was just word play.
dang 3y ago
Url changed from https://9to5mac.com/2023/08/23/textbook-antitrust-case/ https://9to5mac.com/2023/08/23/textbook-antitrust-case/, which points to this. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
logronoide 3y ago
This abuse will come to an end when a CxO goes to jail for a few years. Then things will be taken seriously.
- literalbatshit 3y ago
  There are so many people that would happily take the risk for significant reward though. Like, make millions of dollars a year, 1% chance you go to prison? Lots of takers.
  - logronoide 3y ago
    Your assumption is wrong, a large corp is not an organized crime corporation. To be a CxO of a large corp you just can’t be “people”. You have to be a person qualified way above the rest of us. If you can make millions in a different place not taking the risk of going to jail you won’t take a role in a risky corp. May be they are psychos, but not idiots.
    - literalbatshit 3y ago
      I disagree. Plenty of folks incurred very high fines and even jail time over backdated options. People still backdate options. The risk is low enough, and the return is high enough, for people to creatively interpret the law. As long as there is an interpretation that could be valid, laws will be bent.
EricE 3y ago
Good for them and I hope they smack Apple good. Google, Facebook and the rest of the tech bros aren't far behind in their similar malfeasance.
sylware 3y ago
Until it is not money laundering... The hard part is to sort the "good apples" from the "bad apples" (pun intended)... And I would not be surprised to see some "too good" apples disturbing Big Tech and its friends being sorted as "bad apple"...
- sparrowInHand 3y ago
  Sort of if you break the under-standards- like BG3 - you get sorted as money laundring or gambling?
DannyBee 3y ago
I'm not sure what the textbook antitrust case they think exists here is, or why, and they literally don't explain. Even funnier, none of the claims in the lawsuit are antitrust claims: Count 1: Breach of Implied Covenant of Good Faith and Fair Dealing. Count 2: Intentional Interference with Contractual Relations Count 3: Intentional Interference with Prospective Economic Advantage Count 4: Negligent Interference with Prospective with Prospective Economic Advantage Count 5: Violations of Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 17200, ET SEQ. (17200 is unfair trade practices, which is at least somewhat related to antitrust, but not actually an antitrust claim) I do think you could make out plenty of good antitrust claims against Apple, but this would not be one of them.
coldtea 3y ago
A sad developer treatment, and a sorry-ass state for a platform, but not related to antitrust law, much less a "textbook antitrust case". For starters, Apple is not a monopoly. You are not a monopoly on your own platform, especially if that platform doesn't even have the majority of the relevant market. A company makes a platform or product so that they dictate the terms and if it's a marketplace, what and how it accepts to sell in it.
- arrosenberg 3y ago
  > For starters, Apple is not a monopoly. You are not a monopoly on your own platform Doesn't matter. Antitrust laws address competition, monopoly is just a subset. The Apple App Store is an 800lb Gorilla is the app space, ergo, subject to pro-competition laws. The app developer can't sell his app on iPhones via another channel, iPhones make up a substantial part of the market, and that's why those laws exist and apply in this case.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Luckily, we have a real judge in a real court in the Epic vs Apple lawsuit where the judge said that Apple isn’t a monopoly.
    - hgs3 3y ago
      Let's say you're right and Apple is not a monopoly under current antitrust laws, then all that proves is the laws are too lax.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        It’s not about me being right, it’s about what a real judge says.
        hgs3 3y ago
        Let's say the Judge* is right and Apple is not a monopoly under current antitrust laws, then all that proves is the laws are too lax.
pcurve 3y ago
> Apple pulls apps made by 6-person firm Digital Will. No actionable explanation was offered. > 5 months afterwards, the firm's lawyer sent a letter to Apple. > 2 months later, Apple reinstiated the app without any explanation. > The firm is now suing for damages & lost revenue. $765k.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tinus_hn 3y ago
It’s a textbook case, yet the hundreds of times we’ve heard this story before the lawsuit went nowhere. Perhaps reality isn’t as cut and dried as this article makes it look.
- fyrn_ 3y ago
  Or perhaps Apple has really good lawyers, and whenever a case looks like it might set precedent they settle out of court?
  - tinus_hn 3y ago
    Really good lawyers still can’t defend textbook cases. But you mean to say that for all those indie developers who got their life’s work destroyed it was about the money anyway? Why would you settle otherwise?
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > Really good lawyers still can’t defend textbook cases. In many cases they can, because while the violation is textbook, they find some unrelated technicality to have the case dismissed. The plaintiff is in the wrong jurisdiction, or filed too late, or too early, or agreed to a binding arbitration clause etc. etc. And when they run out of all of that, they open their wallet and pay the plaintiffs to settle so the prospective loss doesn't set a precedent against them or result in an injunction that would order them to discontinue their behavior in general.
      - tinus_hn 3y ago
        So it’s not a textbook case after all?
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        If you're making the excessively literal claim that they don't put cases dismissed on procedural grounds in the textbook, actually sometimes they do, because the procedural issue gets appealed and the appellate court writes a significant opinion about it. But that still doesn't affect whether the substantive issue is a textbook case. You could have the facts of the case exactly match an existing Supreme Court precedent, but that doesn't help the plaintiff if the statute of limitations has run.

144 points by mikece 3y ago

> Since the developer had no idea what it was supposed to have done wrong, it was unable to meet Apple’s appeal requirement of explaining what happened, and how it has resolved the issue. The appeal was thus denied. If nothing else, Apple should fix this. There is ZERO reason to be anything other than 100% transparent.

CamperBob2 3y ago
There is ZERO reason to be anything other than 100% transparent. The customary rationale, at least around here, goes something like "B...b...b...but if we actually document the rules and tell you what you did wrong, it helps the BAD GUYS!!!11!!"
- ungruntled 3y ago
  I agree. Imagine a legal system where the laws are hidden from citizens and they are only informed of their guilt without meaningful appeal. I feel that any severed contract should require a clear reason with evidence along with an real opportunity for a rebuttal. If that fails then the court system can handle the rest. I used to believe that companies should be allowed to halt business with whomever they please, but this is really just being abused by large companies to avoid the costs of scaling their business.
  - layer8 3y ago
    > Imagine a legal system where the laws are hidden from citizens and they are only informed of their guilt without meaningful appeal. That’s almost the definition of kafkaesque.
  - miohtama 3y ago
    This is how anti-money laundering laws, bank account closures and money freeze work. Any compliance officer, as long as they follow the rulebook, can decide to freeze your account on mere suspicion. How the law is written, they do not need to justify their actions any way, there is no lower threshold for suspicious activity, where a suspicion can be anything. To make matter more complex, compliance staff members, or anyone, are not allowed to tell about this to the customer because of “tip off” risk. In fact it is a criminal act to tip off money launderers. Any freeze can last as long as is needed for “investigation” which does not need to be an investigation by authorities. And oh boy, this gets abused.
- donmcronald 3y ago
  I think the app store monopoly is literally the thing that lets the bad guys participate in the first place. Consider competing app stores. Some of them would be stricter than Apple and do a far better job of curation IMO. For example, apps that exist to trick children into in-app purchases could be forbidden. Or maybe someone would start a store for games that only allows up-front sales, no subscriptions, and no ads. I would gravitate to those stores and it’s where I’d send everyone I know. If others did the same, the “specialty” stores would filter out a huge amount of junk that’s currently on the Apple app store. Maybe the market would even shrink by eliminating the low quality participants. How do you run an app store filled with garbage if there’s suddenly competition? IMO, that’s what Apple and Google are scared of. They want to keep selling large volumes of junk and competition makes that harder.
  - LordDragonfang 3y ago
    > Or maybe someone would start a store for games that only allows up-front sales, no subscriptions, and no ads. [...] [Those] stores would filter out a huge amount of junk that’s currently on the Apple app store. While I'd love to live in a universe where this could actually happen, in reality this is a pipe dream. The reason the app store is full of freemium apps stuffed with ads and microtransactions is because that's overwhelmingly the thing that consumers choose, and what makes the most money. Even desktop, a market that has historically used the up-front model is starting to switch to the "freemium or SaaS" model. Any app store that tried to have such principles would find that they get almost no devs willing to add their apps, and those that did would get barely any sales compared to their less scrupulous peers (rendering the store unable to stay solvent at worst, or having almost no effect on the wider market at best)
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > The reason the app store is full of freemium apps stuffed with ads and microtransactions is because that's overwhelmingly the thing that consumers choose But that's the problem with a generalist store. They're leaving too much money on the table to exclude those things, so they include them, and then the store is full of crap and you can't trust anything. If anyone could start a store then you could have a store operated by a tiny startup with low overhead who only has to pay one or two salaries and can therefore be sustainable with only a tiny fraction of the market, because they have a niche. Which enables the quality store to exist, and serve all of the customers who prefer that.
- 6510 3y ago
  I've been silently thinking that anyone who agrees to those terms is a traitor. Promoters of unethical business practices. Willing slaves? Why do people accept these terms?
sidewndr46 3y ago
Apple business practices are a trade secret. If they disclose them to this developer, they'd lose their presumed advantage in the market. Most large companies explain this somewhere in their terms of service, like Amazon using their own proprietary mechanisms for determining what fraud is.
- donmcronald 3y ago
  > Apple business practices are a trade secret. If they disclose them to this developer, they'd lose their presumed advantage in the market. Their advantage is owning the locked down platform. It’s not a secret.
programmarchy 3y ago
Ignorantia juris non excusat.
- frumper 3y ago
  That implies someone can learn what the rules are. Apple is capricious in the enforcement of those overly vague rules.
  - programmarchy 3y ago
    https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ We don't know all the facts yet, but there's one surefire way to get terminated: > If you attempt to cheat the system (for example, by trying to trick the review process, steal user data, copy another developer’s work, manipulate ratings or App Store discovery) your apps will be removed from the store and you will be expelled from the Apple Developer Program.
    - uhhhhhhh 3y ago
      Considering they engaged legal representation and it sounds like Apple rather than fight it restored their account. So we can probably safely assume it wasn't a glaringly obvious or serious breach of the terms that Apple felt it could defend. I don't imagine Apple would make cost benefit decisions about who can break their terms of service with nothing more than a letter with a legal letterhead. That being said we will know for sure as the plaintiff seems to be bound to make Apple foot the legal bill one way or another. Good for them.
      - BizarroLand 3y ago
        I bet what happened is that one of Apples internal qualia changed and caused them to flag this developer, and no human being with any ability to fix things ever actually took a look at what happened until the lawsuit was filed and Apple was at risk of actually losing money because of it. I hope they get a multiplier on their damages. $725,000 for 4 months of downtime for 7 people doesn't seem like enough.

Terretta 3y ago

> anti-trust Anti whose trust?* Apple targets users' trust. If you count up news headlines for your statistics, you may end up biased on the utility a platform provides to end users by shutting down fraudulent dev accounts and erring on the side of caution. Because there are "think of the innocents" headlines when a small dev gets caught in the dragnet, but no headlines about the hordes constantly getting shutdown before more consumers are harmed. The ratio of reporting gives a false impression of the utility. Instead of looking for stories of bad devs getting shut down, you will find plenty pearl clutching headlines castigating Apple for failing to "clean up the app store" (although again, with no denominator under the numerator). In general, though, from the conception of the Mac as a "bicycle for the mind" to the last revamp into Apple-as-a-Service, Apple's platform is, and has always been, for everyday end users, not for devs. It's increasingly difficult to keep it safe for everyday users, and that's pain borne both by the platform creator, and app creators, so that users can do their jobs to be done with less friction, worry, or risk. (See IAP subs vs. any subscription to any other online service, effectively un-cancelable.) If one doesn't agree with that goal, and the costs of maintaining that goal, there are other platforms one can develop for. Meanwhile, 99% of apps, especially ad-supported apps, can be delivered through HTML5: https://developer.ibm.com/tutorials/x-html5mobile3/ https://developer.ibm.com/tutorials/x-html5mobile3/ All that said ... Devs are a user persona too, and Apple can afford to take accountability for any "we're in this together"-driven policy errors. TL;DR: Apple should automatically and proactively make-good any losses caused by mistaken shutdowns. They have the stats: recurring revenue + projected growth + inconvenience/opportunity-cost coverage, auto-deposited for duration. That would be a fine motivation to get better at discriminating on the margins. Would show user trust is important, and dev trust is of value too. - - - * Should have gone without saying: “Anti-trust” is not synonymous with “anti trust”, this was just a hook to talk about trust.

thrown1212 3y ago
Anti-trust not anti trust
- Terretta 3y ago
  Of course. That was just word play.

dang 3y ago

Url changed from https://9to5mac.com/2023/08/23/textbook-antitrust-case/ https://9to5mac.com/2023/08/23/textbook-antitrust-case/, which points to this. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

logronoide 3y ago

This abuse will come to an end when a CxO goes to jail for a few years. Then things will be taken seriously.

literalbatshit 3y ago
There are so many people that would happily take the risk for significant reward though. Like, make millions of dollars a year, 1% chance you go to prison? Lots of takers.
- logronoide 3y ago
  Your assumption is wrong, a large corp is not an organized crime corporation. To be a CxO of a large corp you just can’t be “people”. You have to be a person qualified way above the rest of us. If you can make millions in a different place not taking the risk of going to jail you won’t take a role in a risky corp. May be they are psychos, but not idiots.
  - literalbatshit 3y ago
    I disagree. Plenty of folks incurred very high fines and even jail time over backdated options. People still backdate options. The risk is low enough, and the return is high enough, for people to creatively interpret the law. As long as there is an interpretation that could be valid, laws will be bent.

EricE 3y ago

Good for them and I hope they smack Apple good. Google, Facebook and the rest of the tech bros aren't far behind in their similar malfeasance.

sylware 3y ago

Until it is not money laundering... The hard part is to sort the "good apples" from the "bad apples" (pun intended)... And I would not be surprised to see some "too good" apples disturbing Big Tech and its friends being sorted as "bad apple"...

sparrowInHand 3y ago
Sort of if you break the under-standards- like BG3 - you get sorted as money laundring or gambling?

DannyBee 3y ago

I'm not sure what the textbook antitrust case they think exists here is, or why, and they literally don't explain. Even funnier, none of the claims in the lawsuit are antitrust claims: Count 1: Breach of Implied Covenant of Good Faith and Fair Dealing. Count 2: Intentional Interference with Contractual Relations Count 3: Intentional Interference with Prospective Economic Advantage Count 4: Negligent Interference with Prospective with Prospective Economic Advantage Count 5: Violations of Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 17200, ET SEQ. (17200 is unfair trade practices, which is at least somewhat related to antitrust, but not actually an antitrust claim) I do think you could make out plenty of good antitrust claims against Apple, but this would not be one of them.

coldtea 3y ago

A sad developer treatment, and a sorry-ass state for a platform, but not related to antitrust law, much less a "textbook antitrust case". For starters, Apple is not a monopoly. You are not a monopoly on your own platform, especially if that platform doesn't even have the majority of the relevant market. A company makes a platform or product so that they dictate the terms and if it's a marketplace, what and how it accepts to sell in it.

arrosenberg 3y ago
> For starters, Apple is not a monopoly. You are not a monopoly on your own platform Doesn't matter. Antitrust laws address competition, monopoly is just a subset. The Apple App Store is an 800lb Gorilla is the app space, ergo, subject to pro-competition laws. The app developer can't sell his app on iPhones via another channel, iPhones make up a substantial part of the market, and that's why those laws exist and apply in this case.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Luckily, we have a real judge in a real court in the Epic vs Apple lawsuit where the judge said that Apple isn’t a monopoly.
  - hgs3 3y ago
    Let's say you're right and Apple is not a monopoly under current antitrust laws, then all that proves is the laws are too lax.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      It’s not about me being right, it’s about what a real judge says.
      - hgs3 3y ago
        Let's say the Judge* is right and Apple is not a monopoly under current antitrust laws, then all that proves is the laws are too lax.

pcurve 3y ago

> Apple pulls apps made by 6-person firm Digital Will. No actionable explanation was offered. > 5 months afterwards, the firm's lawyer sent a letter to Apple. > 2 months later, Apple reinstiated the app without any explanation. > The firm is now suing for damages & lost revenue. $765k.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

tinus_hn 3y ago

It’s a textbook case, yet the hundreds of times we’ve heard this story before the lawsuit went nowhere. Perhaps reality isn’t as cut and dried as this article makes it look.

fyrn_ 3y ago
Or perhaps Apple has really good lawyers, and whenever a case looks like it might set precedent they settle out of court?
- tinus_hn 3y ago
  Really good lawyers still can’t defend textbook cases. But you mean to say that for all those indie developers who got their life’s work destroyed it was about the money anyway? Why would you settle otherwise?
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > Really good lawyers still can’t defend textbook cases. In many cases they can, because while the violation is textbook, they find some unrelated technicality to have the case dismissed. The plaintiff is in the wrong jurisdiction, or filed too late, or too early, or agreed to a binding arbitration clause etc. etc. And when they run out of all of that, they open their wallet and pay the plaintiffs to settle so the prospective loss doesn't set a precedent against them or result in an injunction that would order them to discontinue their behavior in general.
    - tinus_hn 3y ago
      So it’s not a textbook case after all?
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        If you're making the excessively literal claim that they don't put cases dismissed on procedural grounds in the textbook, actually sometimes they do, because the procedural issue gets appealed and the appellate court writes a significant opinion about it. But that still doesn't affect whether the substantive issue is a textbook case. You could have the facts of the case exactly match an existing Supreme Court precedent, but that doesn't help the plaintiff if the statute of limitations has run.