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Comment by sigzero | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure that is going to fly though. Apple is the conduit in this case. The developer is still the distributor and has chosen to do so through the store.

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You're really ignoring the obvious facts in favor of arguments over tiny minutiae. The App Store is a store. Not a conduit, not a dumb pipe, a store. Apple maintains it, Apple choses what to stock there, Apple specifies the terms of purchase and Apple makes a profit off each item it sells there. The developer just gives Apple his app to put in its store.

Analogously to this case, if my local store doesn't refrigerate its milk properly, I don't sue the dairy farmer. Apple's App Store is a store in exactly the same sense.

Your analogy fails miserably.

If your grocery store fails to refrigerate otherwise perfectly good milk, the analogy to the App Store would be that Apple injected GPL code into the app.

No, if Nabisco violates a copyright agreement with the box design of some cookies, and your grocery store sells them (unknowingly), the grocery store is not at fault.

The developer did not place any illegal restrictions on the app. Those are all imposed by Apple's store.

Farmer : producer. Walmart : distributor.

Car manufacturer : producer. Car dealership : distributor.

Software developer : producer. Apple App Store : distributor.

I don't think that scenario holds for the actual "license" and it would just make the GPL suck that much more if you try to hold Apple to something like that.

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