Apple’s cert petition at the Supreme Court was basically the argument that’s it’s unfair that a lawsuit from one developer would prevent its anti-steerage language from adhering to any developer.
Regardless of the legality around this, I just don't get that kind of thinking. So anyone who wants to be able to exercise their legal right would have to, individually (or as a class, I guess) take Apple to court over this?
That would actually be kinda fun, now that I think about it. Apple getting hit with thousands of lawsuits over the same thing, all of them settled case law, having to spend all that money on lawyers and court fees.
This reminds me of a dumb quirk of Italian law. Italy offers citizenship to non-citizen foreigners who can prove an unbroken line of citizenship back to their most recent Italian ancestor who was an Italian citizen. (It's more complicated than that and there are some rules and caveats, but that's the basic idea.) There's a super-misogynistic part of that law that says citizenship cannot be passed through female ancestors prior to 1948. The Italian Supreme Court has ruled that part of the law unconstitutional. But the law is still on the books, and Italy's legislature has not updated it to remove the unconstitutional language, so anyone who wants to use that route to get citizenship has to go to court to do so. It's such a waste of everyone's time and money (well, the lawyers, as usual, make out quite well: a slam-dunk case for them that takes very little effort).
Sort of? Apple's appeal was essentially:
1. The federal court was asked by a single litigant to rule on whether this provision of our agreement with them is unfair.
2. Because the role of courts is to provide relief to the litigants of the case, this court has exceeded its authority by making a ruling against all agreements that Apple has with other parties.
I don't know that they necessarily expected to win on that claim, but it doesn't seem to be entirely without merit. There is risk in a world where courts can use individual cases to effectively act with executive and legislative powers.