The issue here (which ColdWetDog ignores) is NOT whether a crime was committed, but WHAT the appropriate punishment should be. The Taliban believe that hands should be cut off when people commit crimes, but we don't believe that do we? I agree that a crime was committed, but I feel the penalty should be something more like a speeding ticket ($100 dollar fine per song, maximum). Incidentally "stealing" is not the crime that is committed here. It is copyright infringement, and non-commercial copyright infringement at that. If I had an apple and it is stolen, I no longer have an apple. If I infringe someone's copyright, they still have the book/music/whatever it is, but someone else has it too. That is a big difference, coldwetdog. Obama seems to have forgotten everything that matters. Forgotten fairness, forgotten transparency (see his continuation of Bush-era secrecy surrounding the ACTA, for example)

First Microsft has done a lot of bad things, but I still think Linus is right, inasmuch ANYTHING can be taken to unreasonable extremes. Microsoft is a profit seeking entity, and they will continue to behave in what they perceive to be in their own self-interest. No one should be surprised about that. The challenge to governments is to erect the right barriers and implement the approporiate carrots and sticks so that narrow self interest does not work against the common good, as it all to often willl in the particular case of a monopolist. In anycase however there is no call for hatred, nor is their a call for hysteria. Linus said something that was just common sense, and shouldn't be at all controversial...

IANAL but, the issue of the copyright status of databases has come before the Supreme Court. The issue was: is an alphabetized list copyrightable? The court said no, because the database itself did not contain originality, it just was pure information. The key fact here is whether or not the database you describe is original, or it just contains facts. From wikipedia: "The ruling of the Court was written by Justice O'Connor. It examined the purpose of copyright and explained the standard of copyrightability as based on originality. It is a long-standing principle of United States copyright law that "information" is not copyrightable, O'Connor notes, but "collections" of information can be. Rural claimed a collection copyright in its directory. The court clarified that the intent of copyright law was not, as claimed by Rural and some lower courts, to reward the efforts of persons collecting information, but rather "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (U.S. Const. 1.8.8), that is, to encourage creative expression. Since facts are purely copied from the world around us, O'Connor concludes, "the sine qua non of copyright is originality". However, the standard for creativity is extremely low. It need not be novel, rather it only needs to possess a "spark" or "minimal degree" of creativity to be protected by copyright. In regard to collections of facts, O'Connor states that copyright can only apply to the creative aspects of collection: the creative choice of what data to include or exclude, the order and style in which the information is presented, etc., but not on the information itself. If Feist were to take the directory and rearrange them it would destroy the copyright owned in the data. The court ruled that Rural's directory was nothing more than an alphabetic list of all subscribers to its service, which it was required to compile under law, and that no creative expression was involved. The fact that Rural spent considerable time and money collecting the data was irrelevant to copyright law, and Rural's copyright claim was dismissed." . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Telephone_Service . http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=499&invol=340

The poor guy was probably subjected to all kinds of threats and abuse; the inevitable result of a company like Apple that tries to maintain absolute secrecy of it products, while farming out the work to sweat shops, where they products are worth many times the wages of the workers...