[MatthewWilkes]

I'm not sure I quite understand your questions.

I'd say that Apple are directly harmed, by the court order to pay £385 million. I haven't seen any suggestion that there has been a transfer of shares as part of the settlement, so it wouldn't align with a stock buyback. Equally, this seems like the opposite of friendly, and the money involved here is tiny compared to Apple's dividend payments.

[hayst4ck]

Corporations aren't people and apple is flush with cash, so I'm not sure what it means for apple to be harmed. Likewise I'm not sure apple is harmed if shareholders feel owning apple stock is safe. The only harm I sort of kind of buy is that it promotes future litigation against Apple.

From a software security perspective, the courts seem like a different "branch" with different properties, so a bad faith actor could explore the difference between what the legal system intends to do and what the legal system can actually do (much like software security is about what software can actually do rather than what the programmer intends it to do).

There are mechanisms for companies to transfer cash/value to shareholders, so if the input and output are the same, but the "stacktrace" of the transfer is different, I think that's worth a little scrutiny.