Today, the spec says that each claim has a single global effective_amount. However, a claim in a channel competes for it's name globally AND within the channel. In both cases, the effective amount is the same. This leads to surprising behavior when the in-channel activation delay does not match the global activation delay.
This happens only when a channel has multiple claims for the same name, a state that does not make much sense if we assume each channel has only one owner. However, this assumption may change in the future, and even if it doesn't, we should be clear about the behavior we want.