“Was Apple the mastermind of a conspiracy among the biggest U.S. book publishers to drive up book prices, or was it just the instrument? It was the former, according to U.S. District Court judge Denise Cote, who has found against the technology giant, the lone remaining defendant in a massive antitrust prosecution by the Justice Department,” Jeff Bercovici reports for Forbes.
“The case centers on an across-the-board hike in e-book prices that took place in early 2010, when Apple introduced its first iPad and, with it, the iBooks virtual marketplace. In lockstep, five of the six largest publishers… raised prices on their e-books and required Amazon to adopt the so-called ‘agency model’ of bookselling rather than the standard wholesale model it had been using,” Bercovici reports. “The publishers have all settled, but Apple has insisted from the start that it was innocent of wrongdoing. In a 160-page ruling, however, Judge Cote says it ‘played a central role in facilitating and executing that conspiracy…It provided the Publisher Defendants with the vision, the format, the timetable, and the coordination that they needed to raise e-book prices.'”
Bercovici reports, “Says Ankur Kapoor, a partner at the law firm Constantine Cannon who specializes in antitrust cases… ‘I think the decision is completely wrong. I didn’t see anything that tied Apple to the conspiracy among the publishers.’ While there’s abundant documentation showing that the publishers coordinated with one another on pricing and other strategic decisions, there’s no proof that Apple acted as their go-between, says Kapoor… In fact, he says, the government’s case contradicts itself: While the publishers were allegedly in a conspiracy to boost prices, Apple successfully sought to limit them by imposing price caps.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “eN” for the heads up.]
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