A judge has determined that Apple CEO Tim Cook should sit for a seven-hour deposition in the upcoming Epic Games antitrust case.
According to court documents, Epic Games wanted to depose Cook for a proposed eight hours. Apple then tried to cite the apex doctrine, which in a nutshell prevents a high-level corporate employee from being deposed. Or, you know, zero hours. Apple later offered a concession of four hours. According to Judge Thomas S. Hixon, however, “this dispute is less than meets the eye.” Hixon writes that the apex doctrine “limits the length of a deposition, rather than barring it altogether,” and that given the circumstances, the dispute is a question of whether Cook should be deposed for “four hours, eight hours, or some length of time in between.” Hence, Hixon’s ruling that Cook should be deposed for seven hours.
As for where Hixon got seven hours from, the judge writes it’s the default rule for “how long a witness must suffer being deposed.”
MacDailyNews Take: A seven-hour Tim Cook deposition that will boil down to this: Epic Games wants to enjoy all of the benefits of Apple’s App Store, including access to well over one billion of the world’s most affluent users for free. That is illogical, unfair, and, basically, theft.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]