$1,025 per hour for partners, $750 for associates, and $310 for paralegals.<p>Those are kind of high. Did they actually charge those rates? Or retroactively bumped up the rates once they knew the case was dismissed?
$1.4 million seems small in comparison to the billions[1] that Microsoft was fined by the EU for bundling certain software with Windows.<p>Acacia did something that would be considered illegal and exploitative in almost every jurisdiction, whereas bundling a browser straddles a legal gray area. Apple does it OS X and iOS, Google does it on Android & Chromebooks, and nearly every Linux distro does it. On iOS, you can't even use a browser engine other than Safari's WebKit. And none of these companies have gotten into trouble.<p>It just seems unfair to me that when a company does something slightly unfairly competitive (like Microsoft) they get hit with huge fines, but when a company like Acacia does something that's outright evil and illegal, the fines are a joke.<p>I do think Microsoft should be paying even bigger fines for patent-trolling Android manufacturers with false patent claims. And a judicial decision or executive act ordering Apple to allow users to install their own software on iOS, and removing the ban on interpreters/browser engines/etc on the App Store would be appropriate.<p>[1] $794 million in 2003, $449 million in 2006, $1.44 billion in 2008, and $765 million (€561 mil)in 2013 -- a total of over $3.4 billion, all for bundling standard software with Windows that all other OSes also bundle. And this money paid in fines to the European Court goes back into the EU budget. (TBH, this smells strangely as a revenue-generating move by the Commission.) See: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission</a>