Any lawyers here able to explain why the fine is negligible? Feels like a complete joke, encouraging dishonesty as the winning strategy in business. Are judges scared they'll be assassinated or something? Do we need to anonymize them?
Unless they knowingly and intentionally broke criminal law, that's completely over the top and unnecessary.
Fines should presumably start small and have a graduated structure to prevent the "just a business expense" approach from becoming a viable one.
The current regulatory problems are due almost entirely (IMO) to lack of active enforcement; why care what the penalty is if you know it won't happen to you regardless?
Seems like the amount was decided by the court. Presumably they would have just levied a larger fine if it was a business that might plausibly just ignore the order and keep infringing on the license
I suppose they were suppose to do it legally and perhaps make more money hoping that the fine will even out the profit, benefits include no bad pr? I don't agree with it either.
Remember folks fines are just written off as business expense. Unless people responsible are jailed long time this will just continue. What happens then ? Pay the fine and repeat cycle.
Fines are only punishments for poor people (or companies, in this case).
Of course, in most rulings it's a fine in addition to the company changing their ways; it's not like the fine means they can keep doing that which they were fined for.
I'm in two minds with these kinds of fines (maybe not super relevant for this specific fine).
1. Do these big megacorps just not care about rules, and they look at fines as a cost of doing business while the steam roll through industries.
2. Have lawmakers completely failed for the past decades to effectively referee tech, and so instead of having sane regulation and clear rules everything has to get decided in courts with fines.
Probably both are true, and the real losers are small businesses trying to get started.
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