“If Steve Jobs were alive today, should he be in jail? That’s the provocative question being debated in antitrust circles in the wake of revelations that Mr. Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, who is deeply revered in Silicon Valley, was the driving force in a conspiracy to prevent competitors from poaching employees,” James B. Stewart writes for The New York Times. “Mr. Jobs seems never to have read, or may have chosen to ignore, the first paragraph of the Sherman Antitrust Act: Every ‘conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce’ is illegal, the act says. ‘Every person who shall make any contract or engage in any combination or conspiracy hereby declared to be illegal shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine’ or ‘by imprisonment not exceeding three years, or by both said punishments.'”
“Mr. Jobs ‘was a walking antitrust violation,’ said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law and an expert in antitrust law. ‘I’m simply astounded by the risks he seemed willing to take,'” Stewart writes. “The anti-poaching pact was hardly Mr. Jobs’s only post-mortem brush with the law. His behavior was at the center of an e-book price-fixing conspiracy with major publishers. After a lengthy trial, a federal judge ruled last summer that ‘Apple played a central role in facilitating and executing that conspiracy.’ (Apple has appealed the decision. The publishers all settled the case.)”
“Mr. Jobs also figured prominently in the options backdating scandal that rocked Silicon Valley eight years ago,” Stewart writes. “Five executives of other companies went to prison for backdating options, but Mr. Jobs was never charged.”
Stewart writes, “Mr. Jobs ‘always believed that the rules that applied to ordinary people didn’t apply to him,’ Walter Isaacson, author of the best-selling biography ‘Steve Jobs,’ told me this week. ‘That was Steve’s genius but also his oddness. He believed he could bend the laws of physics and distort reality. That allowed him to do some amazing things, but also led him to push the envelope.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: First of all, The New York Times is populated by slime buckets.
Secondly, the rules, in general, didn’t apply to Steve Jobs. If they did, he wouldn’t have been Steve Jobs, he would have been some schmuck slaving away in a cubicle at Atari until it all went to shit. And, thirdly, the e-books “judgement” is a fiasco based on fantasy sans hard evidence that, if by some miracle justice prevails, will be overturned on appeal.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Joe Architect” for the heads up.]
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U.S. Justice Department ends criminal probe of backdated stock options at Apple Inc. – July 10, 2008