Larry Lessig is criticising the high amounts of damages in music copyright infringement cases:
(Larry Lessig) "So defraud Californians of $9 billion, pay $1 million. But develop a new technology to make it easier for people to get access to music that they have presumptively purchased: pay more than $54 million.Such are the values of our time."
If I may add, those are the American values of our time.
The German highest court only recently refused to have a lawsuit based on those values served to the defendant (Bertelsmann).
For German observers, these "values" are not merely questionable. They are so fundamentally flawed that any action based on them is contrary to basic values of the rule of law (Rechtsstaat), leading to a highly exceptional total refusal of any cooperation under the Convention on the service abroad of judicial and extrajudicial documents in civil or commercial matters.
Article 13 of that Convention restricts the possible reasons for refusing. It is not enough that German law would not allow this kind of action. Which means that if, as has happened here, Germany refuses to even serve the lawsuit, that is a very strong statement about the merit of the "values of our time".