“Apple (AAPL) is under pressure to settle a civil antitrust case accusing it of conspiring to raise e-book prices, now that the presiding judge has indicated she thinks the U.S. Justice Department has a strong case,” Patrick Seitz reports for Investor’s Business Daily.
“In a pretrial hearing Thursday, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote expressed her tentative view that the Justice Department will be able to show evidence that Apple engaged in a conspiracy with publishers to increase e-book prices, Reuters reported,” Seitz reports. “Attorneys for Apple strongly disagreed with the judge’s preliminary statements. Apple has said its entry into the e-books market benefited consumers by providing competition to Amazon.com.”
“The Justice Department brought its antitrust case against Apple and the five publishers on April 11, 2012. Attorney General Eric Holder said Apple made anticompetitive deals with the publishers ahead of its iPad tablet launch to break Amazon’s dominance in the digital book market,” Seitz reports. “The case implicated Apple’s late CEO Steve Jobs and Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software services, in the scheme.”
Seitz reports, “Don’t expect Apple to cave though, says Gartner analyst Van Baker… Apple is likely to fight the case on principle, he says… ‘They don’t tend to vary in situations where they believe they’re correct,’ Baker said. ‘They’re not going to waffle on this for the sake of expediency.'”
Read more in the full article here.
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