Still not seeing it. They didn't know they were selling counterfeit stuff. The seller misrepresented it. Of COURSE they are obligated to redirect the misgotten money to the proper place, but I really can't see it as "their fault".
When you claim to review the applications of the programs being held on the store, you gave an assurance that you would check the applicants before putting them on the store. There is some room in what "standards" Apple defines which must be met before something gets put on their store, but if they say that they're not checking for fraudulent or scamming programs, it's not much better than saying that they failed to check now isn't it?
In other words, they promised to uphold a standard of amongst the programs being displayed on their store, I think we can both agree that making sure the programs in question aren't fraudulent is the most basic of any public trading company.
Yeah, claiming ignorance is a pretty abusable defense, but one hell of a lot of apps come through that store. If someone published an ebook that was ripped off wholesale from some other, copyrighted, little-known book, and nobody noticed because--surprise--reviewers haven't read every book in existence ever...is that the bookstore's fault?
Yes it is, they profited from it. It doesn't matter how much stuff goes through the store. Volume doesn't give them a free license to profit from fraudulent transactions. If a company can't make sure that the stuff going through their store is legitimate, it's their onus is on the company to make sure that they can. By law any retailer is not supposed to sell items or products which are obtained illegally.
Sorry. I'd edited my original post and left some loose ends hanging. What I meant was "I don't know how much Apple was getting from each sale". Which leaves you with...if they weren't getting much, and he wasn't selling much, how much time can you expect them to spend on it? How much fine print do you expect them to read? Maybe you've never worked in a call center where you're expected to meet a quota, but sometimes you just have to put in some due diligence and if something goes wrong, you fix it later. The alternative is that you go out of business. Which I guess you guys wouldn't mind.
Most EULAs or web based contracts are quite similar to each other. All you nee to do is have enough knowledge to know how to use ctrl+f in a manner where you can find out the relevant bits. In any case, they are supposed to read GNU, they have people trained to do this more or less. In this case searching for the word "resale" would be a pretty good starting point. As for your call center analogy, if you can make sure your company isn't breaking the law with the resources at hand, it's not an option to keep expanding under such circumstances.
In conclusion, being ethical isn't supposed to be easy or convenient. The clue is in the name.