alt Hacker NewsI think you’ve misread the Apple ruling. The appeals court has said they may charge some amount, just not the higher amount that was originally set.
The costs provided here may very well fall into the acceptable boundaries for the courts.
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I honestly don't understand the court rulings regarding all of this. Like, "you need to allow someone to install your software for free" is easy to understand. And "you can ban software that doesn't pay you your chosen cut" is also straightforward (even though I'm a dirty OS Commie that wants that shit for free). Both of those follow clear-cut legal principles based in antitrust and intellectual property law (respectively).
But it seems to me that the court is trying to enforce some kind of middle ground, which doesn't make sense. There's no legal principle one can use to curtail the power of an IP holder aside from mandating it be given away for free. Indeed, the whole idea of IP law is that the true value of the underlying property can only be realized if the property owner has the power of the state to force others to negotiate for it. Apple was told "you can charge for your IP" and said "well all our fee is actually licensing, except for the 3% we pay per transaction". The courts rejected this, so... I mean, what does Apple do now? Keep whittling down the fee until the court finds it reasonable? That can't possibly be good faith compliance (as if Apple has ever complied in good faith lol).
I don't see how you can argue with the courts that the bandwidth cost to serve a 100mb zip file is $4. That's beyond egregious