IP Aggression
There's a two part problem in all of this.
a) Somebody really needs to fix the clusterfuck that is post take down resumption of business to its previous state. Although I despise the way take down notices can be weaponized, there is a need for the mechanism to exist. Time really is a factor if you're dealing with a digital product. But iPad cases and physical goods in general, aren't time sensitive.
Send the fuckers a letter and get the accused in on the action. If you want to jump straight to the judge, fine. But if you're wrong about the infringement, fuck you. You pay for your mistake. Worse than weaponizing legal statutes, is weaponizing the country's courts. Courts are a public resource and you shouldn't be allowed to privatize public assets.
Got sidetracked, sorry. Once the shooting is over there's absolutely no reason to delay getting everybody back to selling stuff. No company should be allowed to inflict damage on the employees and their families by crushing a merchant over a civil matter.
b) Lawyers. Lawyers are the second problem in all this. I'm not sure Jose Public realizes how corporate law firms generally work. I'm not sure most journalists get it either. This sorry, like so many others, implies that Apple sent its lawyers after the seller. Most of the time that's not how it works.
Unless it's a very high profile case, company executives are rarely aware of the lawsuits the company is involved in. Most companies give their legal partners tremendous latitude in who to sue, why, and for how much. The argument goes that since lawyers understand the law it's best to let them handle legal matters without interference (really sucks software developers don't get the same latitude huh :). Precluding the high profile cases, large companies establish cost thresholds that escalate awareness of a particular case and require more authorization from higher up as the costs of a case grow.
Legal partners in huge companies are somewhat similar to big time security services. You provide then with resources and broad mission parameters and trust them to look after your interests unaided. You only find out what's going on when the security team is accused of murdering a village full of peasants. Same with law firms.
Hilariously, lawyers and security companies require you to give up a lot of control. There's simply no way to have the internal resources necessary to look at every case or inside every parcel in your mailbox. Our Chief Counsel is a guy I've worked with for over 25 years. He was the first person I hired when I started my company. He's been to my house for the holidays, knows my family, my Prole Hounds don't even try to bite him.
But I trust the obviously psychotic lunatic that's in charge of our facility security about 100x more than I trust my lawyer. I know nothing about the security guy except his name and I implicitly trust him to not do anything stupid/evil/greedy then try to justify his way out of it by citing legal precedent. I have no such trust in my lawyer.
My point, is that the overwhelming majority of IP cases aren't instigated at the behest of Corporate Overlords. The lawyers are running around, armed, with effectively no oversight and that's considered the best practice for publicly traded companies. Jackass activist shareholders have sued Corporate America so fucking much that not giving your legal team near complete autonomy is tantamount to company execs ordering Giant Pandas just to wipe their ass with.
So thanks for that you grundle scraping investors. Thanks a lot.