0d00d, no wai // harshin the mellow, man :b

Apparently you haven't tried to ride a train in the US recently. I've recently priced a trip from the east to west coast and the train was both more expensive and took longer than going by car. Granted we were taking 5+ people, so YMMV if you're travelling alone.

Also varies by what kind of train and where you are -- here in austin.tx.us, if you're lucky enough to live and work in places where our single little commuter rail line is convenient, it's not only cheaper than gas for a typical (22mpg) passenger vehicle (and that's before repair/insurance/etc factors in), it's cheaper than the bus as well.

The fine would be $150,000, because statutory damages don't care how trivial the infringement is. Still dwarfed by the legal fees for getting to that point, of course.

Actually, there's a fair bit of discretion.

$150K is the maximum statutory damages, and that maximum can be reached only with willful infringement. The typical range is $750-$30K, with the ability to reduce to a bare minimum of $200 if the defendant was unaware of the infringement.

Huh? No decompilation needed -- it's an API, not an implementation -- and Google's implementation of those specific APIs is certainly compatible (any parts which aren't compatible... also aren't part of the legal case!).

Certainly this makes a huge difference to the rest of the world -- just to choose one particular corner, look at how many products are API-compatible with Amazon S3 or EC2.