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Originally Posted by pwalker8
No unstated motives.
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I prefer
not to speculate about people's unstated motives, though I couldn't be certain you'd articulated exactly the argument I'd assumed you had.
There seem to be a lot of members here (and I'm not naming names) who retain someone's initial stated opinion and then choose to respond to all subsequent posts by that individual as if they were camouflaged attempts to advance an agenda stated or implied by the early opinion.
Digressions are fine, but constant ad hominem seems a degradation of the momentum of any discussion. To respond to more reasonable posts as if they were interchangeable with a poster's initial misstep is to privilege enmity over speculative thought.
We all make mistakes and some of them are emotional in nature. Everyone loses their cool occasionally (though some of us are more practiced at losing it off-camera).
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Much of my opinion of Judge Cotes comes from what I found out in my initial research into the original case and if you go back to the original Apple ebook lawsuit thread some time ago, you will find the various links that I posted.
My bottom line issue is that I fail to see how a company can be accused of monopolistic practices when they aren't even in the market yet. In general, it appears that the prosecutor was unable to prove any of the normal things one most prove in a monopoly case, which is why the prosecutor introduced their novel legal theory that Apple should be held to a new standard.
According to the various lawyers who critiqued Judge Cote, she is well known for picking winners and losers very early in a case and for slanting her actions towards whomever it is she favors. It was pointed out that Judge Cote apparently wrote most of her opinion before the case was actually heard. Most of this strikes me as unusual and dangerous. When I read that she took steps such as appointing a monitor that were described as unusual in a case like that, it confirms my impression that the whole situation is very troubling. When I read that the monitor wishes to "monitor" Apple's entire business rather than just the ebook potion, then I suspect that something far beyond the pale is going on here.
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My sense is that we're out of our legal depth. I can see the logic of your argument but know of no way to test or verify its application here.
FJ Torres makes the point that everyone but Apple chose to settle and avoid being targeted -- the idea being that Cote's decisions regarding punishment are unprecedented because no other corporation has been as stupid as Apple about
refusing to settle in the face of such charges.
Whether or not you think that argument is fair to Apple or relevant to the sweep of Cote's decisions, I find the idea difficult to accept -- not because Apple is necessarily in the right, but because corporations often do stupid things based on bad legal advice. If Apple is guilty of that, then I doubt they were the first to make that mistake.
And if Apple isn't the first, then I'd have to study past cases in which companies chose not to settle and compare the actions and outcomes of those to the current example.