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Comment by topkai22 | Hacker News Reader

There is a well established principle that retailers bear some responsibility for what they sell. I doubt Home Depot would get away without liability if they sold a dryer that caught on fire and burned down a house if it was found they had acquired the dryer from a dodgy criminal syndicate.

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Especially considering there is a review process, and Apple takes a 30% cut.

If it was an open market (no review process), and they just took enough to cover operations and processing fees, I can see them being blameless, but if you are going to review apps, you need to actually review them.

That’s an interesting parallel, while Home Depot buys their product, in a market place it works differently. As of now Amazon for instance bears no responsibility of what happens with the vendor’s product as long as they have plausible deniability (“paperwork looked good”).

That’s exacerbated when products are counterfeits and legit brands get pissed off, but it would got the same for unsafe products as well I’d guess.

Amazon getting their provisions corrected could make a positive precedent for digital goods as well.

I feel like the difference should be that if you are merely providing a market, then the customer must "belong to" to vendor: at bare minimum, the vendor must know who they are; Apple, however, insists that the customer belongs to them, that the vendor will learn nothing about the customer, and that the vendor is merely providing software to Apple under a license that allows Apple to sell copies of it to their customers... they absolutely should have full responsibility for the things they choose to sell in this scenario. Apple also certainly isn't just checking "does the paperwork look good": they are carefully examining the product, vetting it, and then claiming on their website and in all their marketing materials that customers can feel safe using all of the apps they sell because of this curation, for which they take a handsome cut of the profits. It is all simply ridiculous, really.

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