“Following a price-fixing conviction against Apple and major publishers, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, which means the lower court’s antitrust ruling stands,” Kirk McElhearn writes for Kirkville.
Apple will have to pay out $400 million in refunds to e-book customers, which they can only use to buy new e-books. The total revenue to publishers for trade e-books in the United States for the first ten months of 2015 was just a bit more than $1.1 billion, so Apple’s settlement could be a significant shot in the arm for the languishing industry. — Bloomberg
McElhearn reports, “This amount will inject a huge sum of money into the publishing industry.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hopefully, the publishers will take this opportunity to price e-books attractively for a change.
SEE ALSO:
Why Apple’s e-book appeal went down in flames – March 7, 2016
U.S. Supreme Court rejects Apple appeal over $450 million e-book case – March 7, 2016
Lawyers. We’ve determined, after endless circular arguments and through the art of bending reality, that you, the happy customer, have paid too much for this product. We are forcing the vendor to pay you a sum as punishment for their actions. You will be happy to know that the money you receive can only be used to buy more the product in question. We, however, will be paid handsomely, and I will finally be able to pay off my ex wife.
MDN:
The price of eBooks are very attractively priced thank you very much. There isn’t any change needed on that front. Many eBooks now cost less and sometimes substantially less than their paper counterparts.
And yet, you can still find many examples of publishers offering ebooks at the same, or higher, price than the dead tree version.
Caveat emptor still applies.
Apple should set aside a billion dollars and use the money to undercut book prices on Amazon for the next year or two. You know amazons “legal” tactic.
Would be funny to see Amazon lose even more money. Lol
I haven’t even checked to see if I’m in the covered class. If I am, I won’t be collecting or spending any of the settlement. Who gets unclaimed settlement money, the lawyer scum?
Got a pop-up ad while trying to use the iPhone app. This is intrusively awful.
Me too, with no way out than to close the app. This is a loathsome practice that the better sites don’t do. Have some restraint MDN.
How will MDN payoff it’s ex wife.
Quit using the MDN mobile app right after the most recent redesign. Now, when I can’t get to my Mac, I don’t read MDN. The last rev went from neutral with respect to the browser version to worthless.
Except that Amazon will extort it all for themselves and the publishers will get nothing. And the DOJ will pat Amazon on the back for such a great monopoly they have. So will the Supreme court who apparently got paid off to just shun Apple’s appeal without even looking at it or hearing the REAL facts. This was a case where everyone on the government side did the proven guilty before they got to the court of law. Even the judge admitted it before she got to court and so excluded all the evidence that Apple had that would have proven the government wrong. Wish I was the fly on the wall to see how many got big pay checks to just give Amazon full monopoly control over e-books and publishers. Cause now the shit is gonna fly when Amazon asks for more and more and legally can do so because the government got paid off.
The reason Apple lost this case is not because the judiciary was bought off, but because its lawyers presented a legal defense that was not legally persuasive. The publishers admitted that they colluded among themselves in restraint of free competition. Everyone agrees that consumer prices went up by over 30% as a result. There could hardly be a clearer case of a conspiracy to violate the anti-trust laws. (Amazon was a much clearer monopoly, but it was managing to do that on its own, without colluding with other parties.)
Apple could have—should have—argued that they were not a part of the conspiracy. They could have shown that Apple was, at most, merely aware of the collusion, but did not condone it… much less organize it, as the Government claimed. Instead, the defense essentially took the tack that violating the antitrust laws was justified in order to stop Amazon’s much more serious restraint of free trade.
Any first-year law student would know how unlikely that approach was to succeed. You can’t prove that you are not guilty just by proving that somebody else is *more* guilty. Ted Bundy cannot gain an acquittal by arguing that Jeffrey Dammer was worse. Amazon was not on trial. Maybe they should have been, but they weren’t. Since the publishers had already settled, the only party in that courtroom with anything to lose was Apple.
Given the obvious existence of a conspiracy and the obvious cost to consumers, Apple was not in a good position going in. Its position did not get any better through appearing to justify the violation, rather than condemning it. The judge had the right to exclude evidence that was irrelevant to Apple’s guilt and did so.
PS. I am posting this from my computer after the MDN app threw me to the App Store three times in five minutes.
That is, eBooks published by the big 5 legacy publishers – do not forget eBooks by Indies. We do tend to operate under the radar, however