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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Unless the fine is the better part of a trillion dollars, it won’t make any difference.

Apple has close to 1/2 trillion in revenue a year. A few billion is rounding error.

Some country recently fined Apple every day until they resolved the issue. I think such solution would both help push Apple to actually resolve the issue and do so in a timely manner.

As much money as they have, no shareholder wants to see a $1m/day expense on the balance sheet.

$1m/day since they launched the iPhone App Store in 2008 is roughly 2 months worth of 30% App Store commision revenue. I.e. they'd be making more money by keeping such a small fine on the balance sheet than complying.

The same thing at $1b/day or rapidly increasing with time might be effective though, but I'm not sure what's really assignable by the given court or not.

If they refuse to comply, why don't we just... arrest them?

Like, you know, we do for someone who was poor and starving and stole 10$ of food?

That is exactly what the judge has triggered. She has referred Alex Roman and anyone else complicit in Apple for review of contempt of course. This carries actual prison time.

Should be Tim Cook and the entire board of directors, though. They are the ones ultimately responsible.

It would be really funny if rich CEOs actually suffered the consequences of their actions, that's a right reserved to the plebes.

You can’t arrest a fictitious person.

Why not?

If a company is a person, it can go in jail.

Freeze their ability to do anything above basic life support without the permission of the judge or court.

Freeze their ability to do anything period. Physically lock the incorporation documents in a prison cell. They won't need to do "basic life support", the documents will be provided with trays of food, water, and adequate opportunities for exercise by the prison facility. If they need more than that, they can petition their former customers to send money to their prison commissary account for the purchase of snacks, toiletries and such.

A fictitious person's executives and directors are typically real. Or, if fictitious as well, go down the rabbit hole of said contractors until you finally find the real ones.

In the country I'm from, each exec gets a partial sentence in accordance with their contribution to the criminal act. And no, the total amount on years in prison needn't match the total, there's a minimum and also percentages always exceed 100%.

Limited liability doesn't and shouldn't protect criminals from imprisonment.

Careful. The real humans at the bottom of that rabbit hole are the individual shareholders. That is the real root of this problem -- the people that ultimately profit from this behavior (a group that, ironically, almost certainly includes the judge in this case, and most of the people in this thread) have no responsibility whatsoever.

Because they're not responsible? We (shareholders) pay executives to manage the companies. This means doing what is best for the company, not committing crimes.

Is the CEO just following orders then? I think there's a precedent for that ruling.

Tim Cook isn't fictious, even if it sometimes appears that way.

Legally, Tim Cook is just another employee.

Apple is a corporation.

Legally, corporations are persons.

Corporations are often referred to as fictitious persons in legal contexts to reduce confusion.

Is your comment asserting that there are no people poor enough to steal food? Or are you claiming that poor people do not get arrested and are in fact treated with kindness and compassion by the various police agencies?

The “them” of Apple is a fictitious person.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/fictitious-person

Your assumptions are absurd.

Thanks and apologies, I totally misinterpreted your comment.

Refers to corporate personhood. You can't jail Apple Inc.

I assure you apple is run by real humans

Piercing the corporate veil is a thing.

that's still not even a billion a year though, on a revenue of hundreds of billions.

Or toss Tim Apple in the huscow for contempt.

I don’t think that’s likely with the referral to the US attorney.

I think Cook will probably find that there is a dollar value that will get Trump to instruct a us attorney to drop charges

Hoosegow?

It's Ozark-Germanic for Hoosegow, though I may have heard it as far west as Amarugia.

The court is pushing for criminal censure of some of the involved participants. If that happens -- and it absolutely should -- it will have a tremendous impact on the hubris seen in Apple, and in the industry in general. Hopefully bribes don't get them out of this, and some Apple execs really do end up with prison sentences.

Apple makes tens of billions of dollars a year off App Store royalties. If this ruling is upheld this fine has a net present value of 100 billion - trillion dollars depending on your discount rate. They will lose billions of dollars a year forever.

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