And if you'd read the rest of my comment, you'll notice two different rationales behind punitive damages that have nothing to do with teaching lessons. It's all about deterrence.
I don't see the distinction. The "lesson" to be taught is that large entities should not use the legal system as a bludgeon to suppress smaller entities - i.e. to deter this kind of behavior.
This happens all the time, not just with copyright law, so doesn't that seem to imply that the penalty for the larger party is insufficient?
>This happens all the time, not just with copyright law, so doesn't that seem to imply that the penalty for the larger party is insufficient?
Not necessarily. With copyright law there's practically no penalty, and I think that should be changed as I said elsewhere in the thread. But the optimal penalty level should be the amount of damages, plus some amount of punitive to account for the probability of a case getting that far, if it's low. If a big company decides that it's worth paying that amount in expectation in a standard tort case, then it is, in fact, efficient to allow that to happen and to have them compensate the other side in the instances where it does happen. At least when we're talking civilly and not criminally, where different concerns apply.
It's classic antitrust. Google considers itself immune.
A class action on behalf of content creators who are being abused combined with federal antitrust action might persuade it otherwise - especially if actions were brought simultaneously in the US and EU.
How would this be antitrust on the platform's part? How do they gain market share?
Someone tried suing Amazon over basically this theory and failed, same lawyer that I'm using in an antitrust case against tp-link for false infringement notices to Amazon.
And https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16562550/thimes-solutio... for my tp-link case, I've mentioned it on HN several times. I have a list of similar cases, some of them use antitrust theories, but it's almost always against the brand/rights owner and not against the platform.
