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Judge Rules Apple Colluded With Publishers to Fix Ebook Prices
Despite many publishers themselves settling with the DOJ over allegations of price fixing ebooks, Apple held firm and recently went to trial. And now the verdict is in: Apple conspired with major publishers to control ebook prices in violation of anti-trust laws. A trial for damages has been ordered. Quoting Reuters: "The decision by U.S. District Judge Denise Cote in Manhattan is a victory for the U.S. government and various states, which the judge said are entitled to injunctive relief. ... Cote said the conspiracy resulted in prices for some e-books rising to $12.99 or $14.99, when Amazon had sold for $9.99. 'The plaintiffs have shown that the publisher defendants conspired with each other to eliminate retail price competition in order to raise e-book prices, and that Apple played a central role in facilitating and executing that conspiracy,' Cote said. 'Without Apple's orchestration of this conspiracy, it would not have succeeded as it did in the spring of 2010,' she added."
Update: 07/10 16:36 GMT by U L : The ruling is now available (160 page PDF).
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/05/business/as-competition-wanes-amazon-cuts-back-its-discounts.html?hpw&_r=0
As Competition Wanes, Amazon Cuts Back Discounts
By DAVID STREITFELD, NY Times
Published: July 4, 2013
"Jim Hollock’s first book, a true-crime tale set in Pennsylvania, got strong reviews and decent sales when it appeared in 2011. Now “Born to Lose” is losing momentum — yet Amazon, to the writer’s intense frustration, has increased the price by nearly a third.
Jim Hollock wrote a true-crime story set in Pennsylvania.
Mr. Hollock’s first book had decent sales when it appeared in 2011, but now that it is losing momentum, Amazon raised the price.
“At this point, people need an inducement,” said Mr. Hollock, a retired corrections official. “But instead of lowering the price, Amazon is raising it.”
Other writers and publishers have the same complaint. They say Amazon, which became the biggest force in bookselling by discounting so heavily it often lost money, has been cutting back its deals for scholarly and small-press books. That creates the uneasy prospect of a two-tier system where some books are priced beyond an audience’s reach."
So I guess now all those people who said that Apple bundling their browser with their OS is okay (because, unlike MS, they've not been found guilty of abusing their monopoly) are now going to reverse their stance and admit that Apple is evil too, huh?
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
This is 100% true. I don't think I've ever seen a Judge say something like this one did. Seem 100% guarantee of a new trial upon apeal.
around here you can't have a product listed on "sale"(as in firesale or whatever) permanently.. why? because it's deceiving. if it's never at the normal price then there's never a special sale price... just the usual price. so if something is 10% or 20% off permanently, all the time, it's just a trick to fool the customer and therefore there are statuary limits on how long a sale can last..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
now if we can just get a judge to rule the fundamental concept of an "e-book" is bullshit and nothing more than an encumbered text document designed to peddle locked down e-garbage hardware and fleece the ignorant.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Hard to see how this was ever going any other way when the publishers involved all settled, including admissions of guilt in the settlement. According the the BBC, Apple will 'appeal against the ruling and fight "false allegations".' Apple has now definitively departed from the reality-based community.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Apple wanted to take over the publishing biz the same way they took over the music biz but with their snobby hardware attitude. Marketing elite feelings to people who buy Macs is one thing.
Trying to raise the price of everything in the marketplace isn't just elitist attitude, it is illegal, and also anti-Adam Smith.
Apple should have known they could sell more books if they sold them cheaper (just like mp3s) but since many execs write books, they have that same elitist attitude NY Times folks have, thinking they set the standard when the real standard for American popular 'news' writing is the National Enquirer.
Everybody who ever bought any number of books will get a single $1-5 credit toward buying another book. States and Federal government will collect
millions of dollars and fines.
Wait, are you seriously so far gone that you're claiming collusion and price-fixing are good things for a free market? Adam Smith didn't even think that.
Oh shut the fuck up with your libertarian idiocy. This is a very clear case of supplier and distributor colluding to fuck over the general public. Apple specifically worked with publishers to raise prices and force those publishers to apply the arbitrarily raised prices evenly among all sales outlets. That's about as anti-consumer of a move as you can get, and they rightfully got called on it.
Sellers CAN set their prices, but not when ALL the sellers get together and artificially raise prices. Which is what was ruled as being orchestrated by Apple.
The price increase is about 30%. Apple's commission on all sales through iTunes, perhaps?
First off, no company evil and it can't be. A company isn't sentient, the people are.
Group dynamics, dude.
Groups act like a single entity - case in point military. It has been shown time and time again, put a person in a uniform and have them identify with the organization and you can get them to do just about anything. The Nazis were expert at this. (I will bitch slap the first person who improperly invokes Godwin's law on this!)
It's the same with a company. When folks are working for a company, they identify with that company. That's why when speaking to a representative of a company and you slight the company - not them personally - many times they'll get irate as if you DID insult them.
If a company "culture" can be just a like a personality. I mean, why is that the cell providers, satellite tv, airlines, and cable companies, even though they are made up of individuals, treat their customers like garbage and have no problems ripping them off?
It's because of a company personality or "culture".
So, yes a company CAN be Evil.
The problem is collusion. You are not allowed to negotiate with all the other publishers to keep the price artificially high. If you do that, the free market can't do it's job.
It's not that the government is setting the price. They are preventing the publishers from setting a price artifically.
Because, tovarich, this is Obama's AMEÑIKA!
Ignoring the ad hominem and appeal to authority, all that's left is "are you ... claiming collusion and price-fixing are good things for a free market?", which is really a straw man since we do not have a free market. But regardless, I am only concerned with whether individual rights are being upheld or violated.
This is just plain ugly.
Personally, a lot of what Apple has done recently is not acceptable,
from changes to the OS to choices of hardware configuration such
as no antiglare screen on the small Macbook Pro.
Tim Cook was a mistake of choice to lead the company, and he will
drive it into the ground, just wait and see.
So if all but one seller sets a certain price, then they are free to do so, but that last one seller is not free to set that same price - then the rules of reality change?
I also do not understand this statement - "artificially raise prices". This assumes there is a correct price for a given product, that sellers know that correct price, and have chosen not to use it. Is that what you are claiming? In a market, the "correct price" is what a buyer and seller are freely willing to agree to, so you could not determine in advance of the actual transaction what price is correct.
You don't understand what collusion is, do you? The sellers specifically conspired together to artificially raise prices, which bypasses the normal supply and demand pricing and allows them to do whatever the hell they wish. If we'd actually allow such a thing, you'd see a lot of goods suddenly inflate in price for no reason whatsoever because by colluding corporations can lock you out of any alternative. Collusion breaks the principle of a free market by removing competition.
You are not allowed to negotiate with all the other publishers to keep the price artificially high. If you do that, the free market can't do it's job.
So individuals are not allowed to be free, otherwise they will violate eachothers freedoms - by freely and voluntarily agreeing to specific trading requirements?
There is no such thing as an "artificial price", as there is no such thing as a "correct price" for any given product.
Hands off, you socialist regulators. If you want lower e-book prices build your own giant company, Then buy or crush enough of the competition to gain an effective hegemony and then don't squeeze the customers. Feel free. Just stop trying to inject things like fairness into our God-given marketplace.
Individuals can set their prices however they want, because they're heterogeneous and competing, i.e. the marketplace is free. A single group cannot be permitted to control an entire market, because that market is no longer free.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The first major hurdle Apple had to explain is how, by adding another competitor, prices went *up.* As we see in almost every sector, as long as supply isn't restricted (such as with natural resources), a new competitor should always lower prices as they compete for the same amount of eyeballs. Prices wars can often be ruinious (see: the flat screen HDTV industry) and only those with the best supply chain and most competitive parts suppliers can hope to survive.
Apple did a pretty crappy job of explaining any of that and the DoJ just repeatedly pounded it home. In the end, this is good news for consumers and possibly authors as well. If self-publishing becomes more common they will see vastly more money in their pockets. Of course publishers do often provide important quality control roles, though if they can no longer promise exposure and production then we might see a steady move away from them. Perhaps a new independant review and editing industry will rise in the e-book industry for quality control purposes.. either that or a lot of people's crappy fan-fiction will end up at market.
I, for one, can't wait for a Edward and Jacob fan fiction love story to hit Amazon.
You're trying to diffuse the point: he consumer got screwed. If practically all providers of a resource (all major book publishers) collude to fix the price the consumer has now choice.
Soooo.... shouldn't Amazon be free to set whatever price they choose for what they sell? But, oh, wait, Apple colluded with publishers to set up a market that forced a particular price on Amazon. So, yes, you are right: Retailers should be free to choose what price they sell for, and disrupting this is specifically what Apple is being whacked for.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
the consumer got screwed
What do that mean? How? In what sense? Was your credit card charged without your permission?
the consumer has no choice.
No choice to start up a competing publishing firm? No choice to buy a physical book instead of an ebook? No choice to go to the library? No choice to use a different manufacturer's device to buy ebooks? No choice to not read the book? No choice to actually pay the price Apple set?
It looks like this has hit the press in a large way, which is why nearly every major technology site is covering it:
New York Times
CNN
Reuters
BBC
The end result of this decision should be to allow Amazon to continue selling ebooks at below cost if it wants to.
You are clueless and demonstrate it by your misapplication of the *fake* "catch-all rebuttal" of "Oh, that's just an ad-hom". Try an ACTUAL rebuttal.
"which is really a straw man since we do not have a free market"
So you're advocating that copyright be removed entirely?
shouldn't Amazon be free to set whatever price they choose for what they sell?
So long as they are not violating any of the voluntary agreements they made with the companies that provide them with their inventory, of course. If Amazon does not like their prices, they do not need to stock their products in its inventory.
If you're all following exactly the same plan, for the same objective, you're no longer individuals. You're a single entity. (As far as the market goes.) When that single entity is effectively the entire ebook market, then you have a market controlled by fiat.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Your idea of a free market is "we make the decisions, but you're free to leave"? What is this, the USSR?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
hmm.. they could have set their prices higher as individuals, but they didn't.
it's when they form a cartel and decide to do it as a cartel that it becomes a problem with the law. they might just as well have merged into a single monopoly corporation, that would then have been broken up.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Who said they didn't? Apple also knows that you can't peddle a reality distortion field on Korean margins. If their RDF springs a leak in one line of business, the hole could enlarge by the forces of erosion to engulf the entire company. Rest assured Google and the Koreans are dumping abrasive powders into the Apple watershed. I think it was a foregone conclusion that Apple's RDF business model would eventually strike this iceberg once they departed the safe harbour of boutique appliances. The tactical advantage of breaking the law to limit the oxygen supply to more nimble competitors during the nascent phase of the eBook market likely outweighs whatever legal penalties they now face.
Popular music has a cultural cachet that lends itself to the iTunes business model. How well has that model worked for classical music? The majority of books are more like classical music than a mass hormonal right of passage.
When a single firm or person is so powerful that they control the market, consumers have no alternative. Thus, this person can charge prices at a level that is abusive to consumers and also can exclude new entrants from the market. The result is a lowered quality of life for citizens, and a more sluggish economy that can't respond to change.
An artificial price is one decided by fiat and not by market forces. By definition, when a trade group decides on a single price, that's an artificial price.
There are no others to set up competing services in this context; the group that decided the prices is composed of every major publisher in the United States.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
What competing publishing firm? The heart of the issue is that all of the US's (and the world's) biggest publishers were part of the group. If even a few of them had defected there not only wouldn't have been anything illegal, the collusion would have failed because of competition.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
if, by some weird chance, 17 different publishers were to COMPLETELY INDEPENDENTLY decide that $9.95 was the price point for a book, then there is no collusion.
If on the other hand, those same publishers were to all talk it over among themselves and decide that they'd ALL sell their product at $9.95, that's collusion.
See the difference?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
If you're all following exactly the same plan, for the same objective, you're no longer individuals. You're a single entity. (As far as the market goes.)
That is irrelevant to the primary consideration of respecting individual rights. If individuals voluntarily agree with eachother and follow the same free trading plan, they do not forfeit their individual rights to be free to make such agreements.
When that single entity is effectively the entire ebook market, then you have a market controlled by fiat.
"Fiat" - that word does not mean what you think it means. There is no government-enforced decree that forces anyone to buy ebooks. You will not go to jail for buying a competing product - such as a real book, or starting your own publishing firm, or going to the library, or just deciding you don't need that book.
I believe you misread my response, I was referring to the "choice to start up a competing publishing firm." Collusion at a price the market won't accept will fail as people won't buy the product, and the companies will lose money. If the market sees that the price could be lower, competing firms will start up to offer lower prices.
In case you didn't notice, this isn't about the rights of an individual, it's about the rights of an extraordinarily large group.
I don't think you know what fiat means.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I love Apple's products (no really, I do), and I make my living supporting them, but anticompetitive behavior is a crime against capitalism itself. It hurts us all. As soon as Apple entered the market, E-book prices went UP. If Apple had truly represented more competition, as they claimed in court, prices should have gone down. The prices went up because Apple illegally colluded with others to fix a higher price (perhaps so they could get their 30% cut). The court should fine Apple something meaningful. How about the $140B they have in cash? Distribute that to everyone who bought E-books. Or put Tim Cook in jail for anticompetitive behavior. No CEO would ever do anything anticompetitive again if they knew they might personally go to jail. I would even support a corporate death penalty for Apple if it sets a precedent: engage in anticompetitive behavior, and the government will terminate your company for good. White collar criminals are different from blue collar criminals in that they usually consider the consequences of getting caught. Only with serious and meaningful punishment can we stop anticompetitive behavior going forward. Let's begin with Apple.
That's like arguing that if you don't like US law, you can just start up your own country. There's no ground to plant it on, not enough people to start it with, and you have no power with which to defend yourself. As you can see for yourself, the small publishers charging less didn't experience any significant growth when the collusion was in place, and sales did not suffer as one would expect from price elasticity. That strongly implies that normal market forces were overridden by the collusion.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Collusion was never shown. The publishers were never shown to get together on pricing.
Apple had conversations with each publisher individually. Reflected in the different agreements for each publisher.
So, what's the problem then?
This is 100% true. I don't think I've ever seen a Judge say something like this one did. Seem 100% guarantee of a new trial upon apeal.
Not true. His statement was at a hearing to decide if the case would be thrown out because of lack of evidence. The Judge simply stated the feds had evidence. The Judge made his statement because Apple asked for his opinion at that point. He was required by law to say something.
An artificial price is one decided by fiat and not by market forces.
Which market force(s) are you referring to? Do you mean the buyer and seller agreeing to a price? Is that not happening in this situation?
Everybody who ever bought any number of books will get a single $1-5 credit toward buying another book
How would that work? Part of the issue is that this collusion drove up prices on other eBook sellers. So unless Apple has to pay out to people bought books on Amazon, etc, it's probably just going to be fines.
The way Amazon was doing business before this all went down was a sure-fire track to an anti-trust case. They priced books below their own wholesale costs to keep competitors out of the business (the margins on Kindles are pretty slim to nil; I don't think you can even call the cheap books a loss leader, since it just leads to more losses). They controlled (still control?) over 90% of the eBook business, and their DRM BS isn't even compatible with the DRM BS that other companies use. (I can buy books from the Kobo bookstore and use a Sony eReader, for instance. And vice versa. No such luck if I buy a Kindle book, though. I have to have a Kindle.)
Apple did Amazon a favour by stepping in and gathering the publishers together. Now Apple's lost a lawsuit, but as far as I know, the agency model will still persist. Amazon dodged a bullet there.
And yet, this didn't happen. Consider that for a moment.
You should consider re-grounding your theory against observed evidence, rather than sticking to something that doesn't appear to accurately model reality. You'll notice that physicists all dropped the whole "luminiferous aether" model after the Michelson-Morely experiment, yes? It's funny that economists don't do the same thing when their own models directly contradict observation, but then I suppose that's why physics is a science and economics is not.
If you don't know what market forces are with relation to the price of goods I'm going to have to pull the loud handle on this conversation. Goodbye.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
A single group cannot
You mean a group of individuals? Why do those individuals lose their inalienable rights when they enter into voluntary agreements with eachother?
because that market is no longer free
How are individuals made unfree while all interactions remain voluntary?
Would you have the same opinion if the oil companies together decided that you should pay $30 a gallon for gas?
No, they colluded to use a different pricing model than Amazon had forced on them through a near-monopoly position on e-books.
And now, in the end, there is more competition. Welcome to modern-day America, where breaking a monopoly is itself considered to be an anti-competitive practice.
So if all but one seller sets a certain price, then they are free to do so, but that last one seller is not free to set that same price - then the rules of reality change?
You go on to claim there is no "correct price' but maintain that there are "rules of reality"? The rules (i.e. laws) are that collusion is illegal, but changing prices independently is not.
If all the publishers had arrived at a higher price point independently there would be no collusion and no case against them. As is, there is an abundance of evidence that they worked together to raise prices.
Multiple sellers are not allowed to agree to set a price on products. That isn't as you say "what a buyer and seller are freely willing to agree to", as the seller is not free to agree to anything other than what they already agreed to with the other sellers.
What's with all this "voluntary agreement" crap anyway? We're talking about e-books. Octet streams. Data. It's only "artificial government coercion" that requires Amazon to give a royalty payment to the publisher for each copy they sell in the first place.
Translation: Appletard is butthurt. Whaaaaa! No fair! Apple should always win in court!
When all beverage manufacturers get together and decide that they are all going to raise prices 5000% because together they have the market cornered, and customers really don't have a choice, then perhaps you will rethink your ideology when sipping that $100 bottle of water. I mean, isn't that fair? It would be something like water $100, coffee $102, starbucks coffee $108, pepsi/coke $101.
So, what's the problem then?
your facts are the problem, in that they arent factual.
The publishers ADMITTED to colluding. Period and full stop on the "fact" you claim exist that the publishers werent colluding. They were, and we know because they admitted it.
"His name was James Damore."
I am only concerned with whether individual rights are being upheld or violated.
Except we're talking about the "rights" of corporations here, which are government fictions. If Apple wants to give up its corporate form, I'm right there with you. But I rather suspect what they want are the rights of a natural person without the liabilities that come with it. The (theoretical) trade for the corporate protection is the subjugation to regulation that natural persons (should) avoid.
And yes, I realize that many companies form a corporation to avoid the ravages of a dysfunctional court system. SNAFU.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The Judge in the case, according to SlashGear, began writing the ruling before the trial began and before even reviewing the evidence from Apple. Regardless of what One thinks of Apple, Amazon, IP, etc., One does not want to "win" that way.
That's right, focus on the government and completely ignore greedy corporations violating antitrust laws. Corporations are our friends, they'll never do anything to hurt us! But damn that government, it is evil and should be stopped! Then we can live in a utopia where the corporations control everything and everyone is free and happy.
The case had little to do with the 'correct' price of ebooks, and a whole lot to do with elimination of the word 'freely' that you used.
Prior to the agreement Apple made with publishers, the publisher could set their own price that the retailer paid. Nothing wrong with that. In turn, the retailer set their own price that the consumer paid. Nothing wrong with that either.
After the agreement with Apple, the publisher set the price that the consumer paid. Not really anything wrong with that (yet). However, the publishers were still using the retailers to 'sell' the books, but the retailers were no longer able to set the price they asked. Now we have a problem. Why should an agreement that Apple has with a publisher to collect 30% on every sale force Amazon to also take a 30% cut? Why should Amazon not be able to lower the price it's customers pay by taking less than a 30% cut? THAT is where the price fixing comes into play. Amazon used to be able to set the price it's customers pay, and no longer can. That is why the prices are said to be 'artificially' set. There no longer is any competition, as the collusion between Apple and the publishers has eliminated it.
Ebooks are free here
This is a sign that you are just making this up as you go along or reading someone else's interpretation. The judge in the case is a woman.
The ONE seller not colluding is not guilty of colluding.
ALL the other sellers colluding are guilty of colluding.
Apparently you need a dictionary. Try borrowing one.
Apparently, you are not a lawyer.
The publishers were shown to "get together" on pricing. It doesn't necessarily mean that they all flew into a conference room all at once and had a meeting scheduled for "price colluding 2013".
But then again, if you really cared about what the problem was, what the facts were, and the law, you would go read the court documents.
Books are not a fungible commodity. People don't decide what book to read based on price, they decide based on the book. Yes, if they set the price too high people won't buy it, but that is not the issue here. The issue here is that if you are using other businesses (retailers) to sell your product, then those other businesses should have a say in how much they will sell the product for. That competition has been completely eliminated by this collusion. And the purpose of the collusion was not simply to set the price of the product, but to ensure that a single retailer no longer had to compete on price.
You lost me at "artificially raise prices" - is there a correct price for ebooks, regardless of context? What is it? If there isn't one, then how can you determine that a given price is "artificially high"? Why are certain voluntary agreements between individuals valid, but others are considered "artificial"?
That's a straw man argument. The propositions of "correct price", "artificially high price" and "artificial agreement" are entirely of your own construction, and have nothing (beyond superficial resemblance) to do what GP was arguing.
I see you've been throwing around "fallacy" terms quite liberally in this thread, so you might find it useful to know what they actually mean. I find this excerpt from Wikipedia to be a decent explanation:
To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the "straw man"), and to refute it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.
Really?
Where did they admit it? Or are you just making up 'facts'?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57568377-93/macmillan-reaches-e-book-pricing-settlement-with-doj/
They settled because they couldn't live with the worst outcome.
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/57204_b57204
"In April, those three publishers decided to settle (without admitting any wrongdoing) instead of fighting the DOJ suit in court."
Even the DOJ doesn't say they admitted to collusion:
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2013/February/13-at-171.html
So now can we work on the major publishers as well?
-Styopa
Oh god you're one of those "magic of the market" types aren't you. Did you just read Ayn Rand today or something?
Message from the real world: Without regulation, a free market is not possible.
If all sellers are FREE to determine the price, and they all set the same price, that is not collusion, and is not a problem. The problem arises when the sellers are no longer free to set their own price, which is exactly what this case is about.
Oh you mean like they do with gasoline? So when is the government going to go after the gas companies?
It's nothing but a shake down.
Who knew?
Actually, your usage of the terms 'ad hominem', 'appeal to authority' and 'straw man' are more of an appeal to authority (the logical tradition) than whatever you found in the AC's comment. You shouldn't use difficult words when you clearly have no idea what they mean.
Yes, ANYONE CAN set whatever price they want on something they're selling, and nobody is going to bat an eyebrow about it. This is even true if ALL of the competitors ultimately end up setting the exact same price, JUST SO LONG AS THEY DO SO INDEPENDANTLY! The problem here is that the so-called competitors were all herded together and browbeat by Apple into colluding on what the price would be for everyone. After that, there's effectively NO competition and market forces are no longer able to influence the price of the product.
As for your red-herring argument that anyone can solve the problem by "starting up their own publishing service...", I'm quite sure you're actually well aware of the monumental barriers to entry that exist in attempting to create a brand-new publishing house from scratch and are once again, simply throwing out specious arguments to support your worldview. Nevertheless, in case I'm wrong, I'll highlight a couple of them for your edification:
The surest sign that it's not an easy road to travel is simple: if it was easy to create a successful new publishing house business from scratch, it would be happening en masse, and clearly this is not occurring. Even when smaller publishing houses manage to make inroads, the industry giants typically move against them anti-competitively, or just swallow them up and in either case, maintain the status quo. Your argument is a straw-man.
Similarly, because of the licensing agreements, if you want to read a popular book, you will HAVE to obtain it through channels provided-for by the publisher of those works. You're NOT going to be able to go through alternate channels to obtain it because that publisher is the SOLE SOURCE of the good, and so you must ultimately succumb to the dictates of the cartel. As for the library argument, Libraries still have to BUY the books that they lend. In a fixed, cartel-governed marketplace, they too must pay artificially high prices, and, in order to continue operating, those costs must be passed along to their customers. As such, you would have to pay higher membership fees, tuition fees, or municipal taxes to cover those increased costs. So it STILL costs you more to access books being sold this way!
Lastly, the phrase, "artificially raise prices" refers to the fact that under the auspices of the cartel, there no-longer exists a downward pressure towards lower prices. In a free (or even, mostly free) market, the theory is that competition will drive prices down to the lowest feasible level. With that pressure removed, there's no way to know what that level is, and so it must be assumed that the cartel-set-price is above what an independent competitor might choose to set (in this case, I believe that Apple's collusion, forced Amazon to raise it's prices by approximately $2 to $4). In this context, "artificial" means, "in the absence of market forces". To directly rebut your statement, the claim is that there theoretically IS a market-driven approximate value for the good, and that this price cannot be determined because a cartel of publishers representing essentially the entirety of the given market has set a fixed price below which no-one is permitted to sell. While it is POSSIBLE that the number set by the cartel matches the lowest potential value of a market-driven price, that is unlikely to be the case (as there's then no benefit to being in the cartel in the first place). Thus it is perfectly reasonable to expect that the fixed price is both artificial (i.e. set by processes OTHER than market-forces) and high (the purpose being to inflate profits by removing competition)...
-AC
Thanks Apple -- you don't have enough cash in the bank, you have to go and stab your customers in the back and price fix. The government should look into your monopoly on Apple compatible hardware and software also. Never did like the smell of rotten Apples.
Summarized:
Apple got them to agree to sell the books to them at X percentage of the sale price.
They also negotiated that if someone else can sell the book for price N, they have to allow apple to do so, but with Apple's cost still being a percentage of a sale price.
Music Industry:
The music industry was dead-set against selling digital music, DRM or not. Period.
Apple made the heavy DRM concessions up front, but negotiated hard to get a profitable model. By the time digital music was mainstream (through Apple's active marketing/etc.), the music industry was so desperate that they had to turn to Amazon to shake stuff up, and they lost DRM in the process . . .
Amazon had the book industry by the book-bindng . . . don't you think it was just the industry trying to save itself?
Amazon is NOT lillywhite, nor are the book publishers; authors are NOT always compensated for Kindle/Nook editions, the same way that Music Artists don't get a 'fair' (meaning what they SEEMED to agree to previously) cut.
"One persons freedom ends where another persons freedom begins" Apple freedom to negotiate prices with the publishers ends when they limit the freedom of others (Amazon) to do the same
Collusion breaks the principle of a free market by removing competition.
How can free individuals interacting voluntarily without violating the rights of others, lead to the loss of others' freedoms? Are you assuming people have a right to buy a product at an affordable price? I do not understand how a free interaction (where rights are not violated) can lead to a non-free market. Isn't it by definition a free market?
He's just going to turn around and say, "no one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to buy packaged drinks!"
Just mod him troll/flamebait and move on.
Betcha $1k this tool would be one of the first ones to scream "GUBMINT! HALP" if that happened.
It's a nice fantasy that free markets really are truly and completely free, but in reality, without regulation, $30/gallon would be a cheap price for gas.
Books must then be sold like gasoline at 9/10ths subject to availability, wars and costs not obvious to consumers like IP lawyers, patent suits, web-hosting outages, alternative energy hosting costs, etc...
If that were true, it still doesn't change anything. Replacing one monopoly with another monopoly is still anti-competitive. The only difference is who benefits from it.
The only reason Amazon had a near-monopoly on ebooks was because they were the only retailer aggressively pursuing an ebook market. Any other retailer was equally open to compete against Amazon on pricing if they wished.
Apple, of all companies, could have chosen to compete against Amazon on price, they certainly have enough money. They could have given away access to an all you can read book locker just for buying an iDevice, if they wanted. They chose to be greedy and collude with publishers to ensure they got their 30% cut no matter what, at the expense of the consumer.
The great thing about people like you: here is a clear example of a market failure (collusion is a market failure, no matter how you want to spin it), and you still stand firm with the idiotic "free market will sort it out!" chant.
It makes it very clear that you don't have a goddamn clue what a free market even is.
Of course, so long as the government also removed its various restrictions on drilling and competition, as well as any subsidies it provides to oil companies. There is much more government cronyism in the oil market than in technology/books. The primary focus should be on removing that cronyism by shrinking the government down to its one proper role (protecting individual rights), rather than attempting to put a band-aid on the situation by enacting antitrust laws.
I also do not understand this statement - "artificially raise prices". This assumes there is a correct price for a given product, that sellers know that correct price, and have chosen not to use it.
The "correct" price is what the free market determines. In the event that there is no free market, no correct price can be set.
In this case the sellers colluded to set prices in unison, effectively acting as a single seller. This gives the buyers no say in what the "correct" price is, effectively eliminating the free-market behavior.
Wow, I went from +5 Insightful to -1 Troll in a matter of minutes.
Apple only has 20% of the ebook market. Amazon still has over half, most of the rest being B&N. When Apple first started in ebooks, Amazon had almost all of the market.
That looks like the market busting monopolies by itself. I think the government's offended that can happen, that the market doesn't always need them to break up monopolies.
No, it implies that the demand for the good was less elastic than you thought.
I don't recall voluntarily agreeing to copyright laws. Why, then, should I be obligated to obey them? Especially given that it infringes on my right of free speech to be forbidden to copy a work, regardless of whether it originated with me or not.
The answer of course is that majorities tend to rule, and if a majority has a legitimate power to establish a copyright law, they likely have a legitimate power to establish an antitrust law.
Oh, and BTW, I think you may have misunderstood what an ad hominem argument is. When someone says that you're stupid, and that therefore because you are stupid, your argument is wrong, that is an ad hominem argument. It's fallacious because even stupid people can make valid arguments; out of the mouths of babes and all that. OTOH, when someone says that your argument is wrong, and also that you're stupid (not as a necessary consequence of having made a wrong argument, mind; everyone makes mistakes), that isn't an ad hominem, that's just an insult. Maybe it doesn't do much for the quality of the debate, but it can have a certain rhetorical usefulness, and it can be fun, you dipshit.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Must be the government's fault.
Not true, buyers do have a say because they can reject the deal. Unless you're being compelled to buy the product (say by way of a penalty, oops I mean tax) then the free market still exists and the collusion itself will eventually self destruct.
I only blame myself for not explaining my views clearly enough. But thanks for playing.
Pffft...yeah poor defenseless Amazon. I mean they're just some mom-and-pop operation with no influence over their suppliers. They could just walk away from the entire book market and who would even notice?
It's also possible that everyone knows quite well what your views are, but disagrees with them, and no amount of "clarification" is going to change that.
Here's the problem - there is nothing illegal or wrong with having a monopoly. The problems depend on what you DO with the monopoly. And what, exactly, did Amazon do that hurt the consumer? Nothing.
Of course Apple was able to gain a sizable share of the ebook market - that is what happens when you abuse your monopoly in one area to remove competition in a different area. Once Apple was able to remove that pesky need to compete they were easily able to expolit their dominant position in app and music sales to get a share of the ebook market.
That is not, in any meaningful way, 'busting a monopoly'. That is screwing the consumer simply so a giant does not have to worry about that annoying competition.
There are any number of products that are sold this way with no one objecting. Try buying a Vox AC30C2 guitar amplifier for a dollar less than $999.99 anywhere in the country.
If we'd actually allow such a thing, you'd see a lot of goods suddenly inflate in price for no reason whatsoever because by colluding corporations can lock you out of any alternative. Collusion breaks the principle of a free market by removing competition.
Citation needed.
As in, where historically has this type of collusion been used? How long was it sustained before it was stopped? Because even a cabal of corporations have very little control over the competition their products will get.
Products don't just compete against their own category. They compete against everything else. Food, entertainment, housing, transportation - name it, there's enough alternatives that it'd take more than collusion amongst a few (or many) companies to "shut down" competition.
Of course buyers have a say. Books are not commodities, they are one-off creative works. Each one is worth what it's worth to an individual reader. It's up to the reader to decide of they wish to pay the asked for price or not.
This doesn't work. Every major publisher in the United States is not selling the same set of books. Each publisher is selling /their/ books. Books are not commodities, they are not subject to 'supply and demand', They are one-off creative works with what is, for all intents and purposes, infinite supply. Additionally, each publisher is, again in effect, it's own monopoly.
What is so difficult to understand about this? The publishers are perfectly free to set whatever price they want for their books. They can NOT restrict the right of the retailers to set whatever price THEY want. The 'individuals' (retailers) did NOT 'voluntarily' agree to this, they had it forced on them by the collusion of Apple and the publishers. If the publishers want to make $10 from their book, they are perfectly free to set the price at $10 (no matter how many of them do it). If Apple wants to try to sell the book for $13, and Amazon wants to sell it for $9, that is perfectly fine. What is NOT fine is saying that because Apple wants $13 for the book, Amazon MUST sell it for $13, which is exactly what this is about.
Assuming that Amazon had a monopoly position in e-books, the ends do not justify the means. If Amazon has this control, why not take your complaint to the DOJ?
neither do you, idiot
Because we don't need the DOJ when the market can work it out through competition, as it clearly did.
You're throwing quotes around but you're not actually saying anything. If you're going to respond at least don't half-ass it.
It's not Amazon's fault B&N have physical retail stores they choose to try to keep open. B&N wants to sell physical books, in their book stores. Their website, the Nook, etc are responses to Amazon, but they don't push it. They're not even going to make their Nooks anymore, since there are so many other Android tablets.
Apple has no interest in selling books. They want to keep their tablet competitive with Amazon's tablets and get their usual 30% take off the top of book sales, which Amazon doesn't have to pay them for since their app doesn't do in-app purchases. Apple resolutely can not tolerate 3rd parties making a profit through their devices without paying them off to top. Since Amazon can do sales through their website, circumventing the iTunes store tax, Apple had to make their own ebook app and rig the market in their favor.
The only reason Apple gained 20% share of the ebook market was because of the price collusion with the publishers, they otherwise expend zero effort in marketing ebooks or trying to grow that market because it's an add-on feature to the product that makes them money, the phone/tablet.
That is probably a 'minimum advertised price', not a fixed price. Lots of things have MAPs. This is why you will often see 'call to get price' or 'add to cart to see price' statements. The retailer is not restricted from selling at a lower price, they are just not allowed to advertise the lower price. Big difference.
Apple was using contracts to enforce a price increase. Contracts are enforced by the government. Governments enforce contracts with violence and by taking property. It is not in the government's interest to raise prices. Thus we have this lawsuit that effectively voids the contracts. Without the force of the contracts this scheme won't work.
That's what a market is, idiot.
You don't have to dig far. Oil is an extremely visible and still problematic example. There are very few oil companies and they are known to maintain an oligopoly so that they can set prices to what they desire. Many times, you'll see prices at the pump increase for no apparent reason, you'll even hear regulatory agencies ask the oil companies and only be answered by shrugs. The answer is that they'll jack up price ahead of things like vacation weekends in order to make more money off people going out. Fuel competes against nothing; for most Americans, you NEED fuel to do just about everything. Even with rising gas prices, you still get the fuel.
Another recent example is construction works, particularly public sector. There are massive collusion networks that artificially raise prices by 5-15% (perhaps even more) and buy the silence of politicians and government workers. They set prices together, they decide who is going to get which contract, and if a newcomer decides not to play ball, they suffocate it until they leave or go bankrupt.
In both cases, the practices are unhealthy. They raise prices for consumers with them having no alternatives. The free market is based on competition, so if there is no competition, then you're suddenly not in a free market anymore. Collusion is basically instituting oligopolies, which are only slightly less problematic than monopolies.
Just give up. These retards can't understand basic words, let alone logic. You're trying to get them to think and they just repeat their basic assumptions, rather than questioning or justifying them.
Because that's how we, in the USA, decided it was fair to set up the rules. If you disagree, you're free to:
1) Campaign for, contribute to and vote for politicians who agree with you
2) Run for office
3) Move somewhere where government for the corporation, of the corporation and by the corporation has not vanished from the Earth
You mean like the oil industry? Keeping the fuel costs high when the crude fell very significantly?
But the market didn't work it out through competition.
Amazon were quite happy buying ebooks from the publishers at a price the publishers were happy with. Amazon were also quite happy to leverage their low operating cost model to sell books at the minimum markup possible. Amazon's customers benefitted from the resulting low prices and are happy that they don't even need to buy a Kindle to take advantage of them; they can use their ebooks on most of the tablets already out there.
Enter Apple, who want to make 30% margin on everything sold via the iBookstore in order to break even or make a huge profit. They don't want to compete with Amazon on price so they work with the publishers to ensure that Amazon can't undercut Apple anymore, because the prices are now set by publishers.
The end result is that the average price of ebooks goes up and Amazon's customers, who previously enjoyed low prices, must now pay more because the publishers won't let Amazon sell them books at a cheaper price than Apple does.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
You are flogging a dead horse. Despite your skewed view on the subject, the publishers all settled with the DOJ; every single one of them. And only Apple fought. Apple lost.
Therefore, one can safely argue that you are in fact wrong in your both your assumptions and your reasoning.
without violating the rights of others
People have a right to a legal system that doesn't create monopolies. Involving the government by writing contracts partially nullifies your argument. Is a person "interacting voluntarily" when they are sued over violating a "Most Favored Nation" clause? Apple didn't just create a Trust. They created a Trust they hoped had the force of government behind it. They wanted a Trust that would prevent Amazon from competing out of fear of lawsuits.
That's like saying a country has free elections because it's citizens can either not vote, or vote for the one candidate allowed to run for office.
If the only choice is a binary "I don't get the book" vs "I pay a small premium because everyone is priced the same", it's not really a choice.
There are these pesky little things called consumer rights. In much of the developed world, the Government realises that consumers are often put at a disadvantage because big business is able to dictate terms which are to the detriment to the customer. Often the consumer is simply left to 'take it or leave it'.
I'm from Europe so here are a couple of examples of consumer law which is designed to protect the customer against big business, even if the customer is willing to enter into voluntary agreements with businesses.
- Goods sold must be of merchantable quality and as designed. Typically this means they must last two years without breaking, otherwise the retailer has to replace or refund the purchase. Apple fell foul of this law in the EU.
- Companies can't collude to set prices. For example, a mobile phone manufacturer can't say to the networks that they must sell a phone at a certain price point. This is because such actions are to the detriment of customers.
- The advertised price of an airline ticket must include all mandatory extra charges. Some of the airlines in Europe (e.g. Ryanair) advertised a really low price to entice customers to their website, then just before checkout taxes and an admin fee were added. This was ruled illegal because it was to the detriment of customers.
I'm sure similar laws also exist in the US, particularly with regards to price collusion. This is what Apple has been found guilty of. The reason they have been found guilty is because consumer rights have been violated as a result of their collusion with publishers.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
No, I certainly know, but I don't believe you do, thus the question.
at $9.00, or even at $7.00 ebooks are vastly oberpriced. Even with the cost of editing, formatting, paying the author etc...anything over $5 to $6 is price gouging for an ebook. Especially since you cannot truly "own"an ebook. There is no actual physical product. You cannot (legally) loan(except in a very limited way) or give away an ebook, nor can it be resold when you have read it.
I (and many others) feel that the following changes to current copyright law and/or new laws are necessary to protect library's and consumer's rights as pertains to ebooks.
1. When any entity purchases an ebook, that entity owns that ebook in the same way that they would a physical book, with all the rights and responsibilities of such ownership. Specifically, the right to sell, loan out, or destroy the ebook. Of course if the ebook is sold, the seller cannot retain a copy. If loaned, the ebook could only be loaned to one person at a time, but able to be loaned and returned an indefinite number of times. This needs to be made retroactive back to the first ebook sold.
2. Publishers must be made to make their entire catalog available as ebooks to both consumers and libraries at a reasonable retail price . I and others believe that the price of an ebook needs to be no higher than 70% of the current mass-market paperback price.
3. There should be no restrictions on libraries loaning ebooks other than those that currently apply to the loaning of physical books with the exception that ebooks be available for download by library patrons, and that said ebooks be returned (or expire) after a period of time determined by the library(not the publishers), but not less than 14 days. Through the use of current technology, ebooks can be made to expire after a number of days. After that, they can no longer be read.
4. Consumers must be allowed convert their purchased ebooks to formats that can be read on any device. There are currently many formats used, but few (if any) devices can read more than three or four of them.
5. Most devices used to read ebooks have the capability to read the ebooks to their owners (known as text to speech). However, many publishers have demanded (and gotten) control of this feature (via DRM) so that for many ebooks this feature of the hardware will not work. This is just plain wrong! Just as a physical book may be read to someone by another person, I believe very strongly that ebooks should ALL be capable of being read to their owners if their devices have that capability. I believe that this feature could be very useful to visually impaired persons, as well as others!
Many times, you'll see prices at the pump increase for no apparent reason, you'll even hear regulatory agencies ask the oil companies and only be answered by shrugs. The answer is that they'll jack up price ahead of things like vacation weekends in order to make more money off people going out. Fuel competes against nothing; for most Americans, you NEED fuel to do just about everything. Even with rising gas prices, you still get the fuel.
You answered your own "no apparent reason" claim. "vacation weekends" means more people are planning to drive around and use more gas. if the supply doesn't fluctuate much day to day, but the demand does - what does Econ 101 predict?
Vacation weekend driving tells you that there is a lot more "luxury" driving (for personal entertainment/recreation) - if higher gas prices make it not worth it, that's a price signal that perhaps the vacation should be limited to closer locations, or maybe the family should just stay at home.
Another recent example is construction works, particularly public sector. There are massive collusion networks that artificially raise prices by 5-15% (perhaps even more) and buy the silence of politicians and government workers. They set prices together, they decide who is going to get which contract, and if a newcomer decides not to play ball, they suffocate it until they leave or go bankrupt.
Political corruption with public sector projects is not "free market collusion", the supposed evil we need gov't to protect us against.
Your first example is not an example of collusion. Your second example is not free market, as the gov't is a party to the transaction. Do you have any examples at all?
Once you collude, any price changes are 'artificial'. Thats the whole crux here, the conspiracy to not compete. THAT is the crime.
Good-bye
I also do not understand this statement - "artificially raise prices".
If seller A sells book X for $10 while seller B for $14, then it's very likely seller B will suffer a loss on that particular book because all buyers will choose the cheapest seller for $10.
To ensure neither suffers a loss, they both agree to sell book X for $12 -- this is collusion. While the $10 price will give them a 30% (say) margin of profit, $12 gives them a 40% profit margin, but requires active agreement among all the sellers to cooperate instead of competing against one another.
On the other hand, I agree with you. Why is Amazon's $10 magically okay while Apple's $12.50 illegal? The price of a product is what the market is willing to bear -- that's trading.
The 'correct' price is a cost to produce plus minor profit. Anything else is abuse.
Good-bye
ok. So you're trying to apply logic. That's a good first step.
I like to see the nutters try and grow so I'll spell it out for you. Apple "worked with" the publishers to raise prices. Both parties want prices to be raised (the customers, a third party, don't). What the publishers didn't want is to raise the prices evenly. They wanted to control which books sold and which books didn't. That let's them bully authors and get better deals on the supply side. Apple wanted the prices to rise across the board for a variety of reasons.
Apple "forced" publishers to raise prices across the board, against their best interest. Apple did this, most probably, through the force of business. IE, do it or we won't play along and prices will stay low and you lose a buck. It's an every so slight bit of hyperbole. Akin to how a company forces people to pay high prices when they gouge after a disaster and everyone NEEDS basic commodities. When no paying isn't an option, it's considered "forced". If they wanted the collusion to go through, the publishers were forced to concede the control of individual prices.
Holy Cow, are you really this dense? Have you not actually participated in business? You can't be that young with that ID that low. You are BALLS TO THE WALLS into crazy libertarian land here. Oh, but wait, lemme guess: Are you the sort that feels they're "forced" to pay taxes? Is it akin to jackboot thugs curb-stomping you every time you look at your paycheck?
I don't recall voluntarily agreeing to copyright laws. Why, then, should I be obligated to obey them? Especially given that it infringes on my right of free speech to be forbidden to copy a work, regardless of whether it originated with me or not.
Just because you did not voluntarily agree to not murder or rob someone does not give you the right to kill people. Stealing the property of others without payment is not free speech.
The answer of course is that majorities tend to rule, and if a majority has a legitimate power to establish a copyright law, they likely have a legitimate power to establish an antitrust law.
Laws are also formed based on justice and fairness. Copyright ensures payment to the creators of the creative work in exchange for payment from the consumer. The payment encourages and supports the creative class to create more work, and so on.
Amazon's $9.99 model was pushing books at a loss leader, below the wholesale price, in order to keep everyone else out of the market. They were able to do this because they were selling Kindles. Consistently selling at a loss is a key indicator you have an anti-competitive monopoly. The consumers benefitted from low kerosene prices with Standard Oil's monopoly, but the government still broke them up because of how they treated other companies.
Along comes Apple, a new player, who says they could probably do pretty good in the eBook market with the popular iPad. The publishers see this as a way to break Amazon's wholesale model grip and introduce the agency model they've been wanting, where books are priced according to what the market will bear. Deal done.
Ta-da, Amazon monopoly broken, each book can be priced appropriately, not artifically limited to $9.99 in order to sustain one company's profit.
And this is a bad thing?
It's laughable that you don't even realize that anti-trust laws are protecting your "individual rights".
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Doesn't matter what you want to call it. Prices go up. Curruption of goverment occurs. All of this leads to riots in the streets. As seen in Tunisia and countless other countries throughtout history.
Dont nail them for some arbitrary amount that will be isolated and written off by the accountants. Hit them where it really hurts them: deny them the right to compete in a market. That would be a real punishment for them.
After all, they cheated. Let them be forced out of the game for a while. Then when they try to come back in, they will be so far behind they may actually have to offer some benefit to the consumer.
You have got to be kidding. For a couple years, the entire entry way for a B&N was crowded with Nooks. They were shoving them down peoples' throats more than a Krisha at an airport.
They are not even in the same market. There's no competition. Putting an e-reader on the iPad was even a last-minute thought. Eddie Cue convinced Steve Jobs to do it just before the iPad's launch. Then the idea to couple it with a store hit, and Cue had two months to have the app, the store and the publisher deals done because Jobs wanted to demo them on stage.
Seriously, it's not a grand conspiracy, it's a hastily-constructed afterthought that ended up being successful.
Ok ok, lemme try this:
Business and markets are not infinitely liquid and divisible. It takes time and a critical sum of money to make a go of it and enter a market and start competing.
Companies who are already in markets can, temporarily, raise prices and screw over customers. Customers will, of course, call bullshit demand better service, and others will step up and try to serve them. The controlling company can then drop prices and undercut said competition. This is why monopolies are bad. But, of course, customers aren't fickle idiots. (not all of them [not all the time]). If they were truly pissed then they wouldn't go back to the abusive company for any price.
It's like a circuit. Not everything has perfect conductance. It takes time for capacitors and inductors to discharge. You drop voltage across resistors. Likewise, a old and busted company can maintain operation for a LONG time before they go broke. And the overhead of starting up a company can make it impossible to effectively compete in a markets. Voltage is cash, resistance is cost, caps are savings, inductors are... what... brand loyalty? I dunno this analogy is falling apart worse then my last 555.
In new markets, ones created by technological revolutions, the first to market of course has a monopoly. That's generally viewed as acceptable, and any price they set is ok. As soon as competition shows up, certain behaviors are illegal as they're anti-competitive. And without competition, the whole system rots and falls apart. And e-books are in not a new market BY FAR.
The reason that everyone is slinging names at you is that this is pretty bloody obvious to anyone who has paid attention to history, economics, politics, or the news.
So you assume books are fungible goods? Preposterous.
Bullshit. The correct price (for luxury items like books) is whatever both parties agree on, and has absolutely nothing to do with cost (except that cost may set a lower limit on what the seller may accept). Anything else is just stupid. Note that 'agree on' does not imply any negotiation, just a simple 'this is my price, ok I'll take it' is enough.
I guess you have no clue about what a cartel is nor any idea of the negative impacts caused by such an existance.
Great. Now try applying your argument to technical books. Especially books required to attend a class or course. And then watch your argument fall flat on its face.
Stealing the property of others without payment is not free speech.
So if I print up a copy of Oliver Twist or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, without paying Dickens or Twain, you're saying that that would be stealing and that I could not assert a free speech right against the state if they tried to shut me down? News to me.
BTW, property law is also a matter of consensus. Get enough people together and you can change who owns property regardless of the consent of the previous owners or possessors. If you don't believe me, take a look at how the US came to control much of North America.
Copyright ensures payment to the creators of the creative work in exchange for payment from the consumer. The payment encourages and supports the creative class to create more work, and so on.
I'm sure you've badly misworded whatever you were trying to say; what you have there is classic 'heads, I win' (authors get paid), 'tails, you lose' (in exchange for readers getting to pay).
Copyright is utilitarian through and through, and can be thought of best as a means of exploiting authors for the benefit of the public. The authors get something out of it, but it's a bit like how dairy farmers deign to feed their cows, even though all the farmer really wants is the milk. If starving the cows worked better, he'd do it. We give authors a chance to get money (not even guaranteed money!) because it's convenient for us. Not because it is right or fair or other such crap. If we were concerned with authors having a comfortable life because it was fair, we would give everyone such a life; only giving it to authors would not be fair.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
No it is not. All you had to do was to read Adam Smith to figure it out. Of course if you are demented enough to think cartels and abusing the state granted power to enforce contracts (which is what Apple did) to abuse the market are viable techniques, then I have this bridge to sell you. Or perhaps you would be interested in this contract where I give you a house in exchange for selling your children into slavery for life. Jackass.
You know what, I can choose to download and use the Kindle app or the Nook app on my iPhone. You know what I can't choose? I can't uninstall Apple's iBook app. For an afterthought it's pretty curious that they made sure to bundle it into iOS whether you wanted it or not.
As for the conspiracy, well that was just proven in court.
I dont see books as a luxury.
Good-bye
Of course there is. Books are not a requirement for living. If a book is priced at a level you don't want to pay, wait for it to go down in price, wait for it to show up in the library or do without. I would rather pay a little more for ebooks than have Amazon drive all the publishers out of business and be stuck with nothing but the self-published crap Amazon publishes. Some of that stuff would get a failing mark in 6th grade.
You can't uninstall a lot of apps on a lot of phones. So what? An iPhone comes with much less junkware than the average Android. Note that Apple is not preventing you from installing the Kindle or Nook apps.
They only proved a "conspiracy" to break a monopoly and let the producers of the goods set their prices (what a concept!). Prior to the iBookstore we had pretty much one legal source for new ebooks. Now we have three (Apple and B&N at 20%, Amazon at 60%). The government should be thanking Apple.
Just because you don't see them that way does not mean they aren't. From The Free Dictionary: "Something inessential but conducive to pleasure and comfort." You do not need books to live (whether you think you do or not), so they are inessential.
Wow, I went from +5 Insightful to -1 Troll in a matter of minutes.
Mainly because you over look that the gov't is what granted the "IP right" (which is a privilege) in the first place. You can "charge" whatever you want for your property, but first sale doctrine makes it mine when I buy it. I'm then free to make one or a million copies. You want the gov't to disrupt the free market to enforce copyright, then you have to accept the other market interference (anti-monopoly/cartel/collusion/etc) provisions as well.
The market was never allowed to make its judgement; DOJ jumped the gun at Amazon's behest. Trial evidence showed Apple didn't know if slightly higher prices would succeed or fail. Apple was ready to see what the market would do. If sales slowed or didn't materialize, things would have to change. That's how the market would've and should've been allowed to deal with the issue. Instead, Amazon, who had had 90% marketshare that only fell as the new agency model came in, complained to the Justice Dept. What Amazon did was set a false floor, it engaged in predatory pricing that preventing meaningful competition from taking root.
No competitor had any real marketshare, by comparison, until the agency model. The agency model brought competition to the ebook/eReader market. Nook benefited far more than iPad. Consumers benefitted by not being tied to the Kindle proprietary platform.
So if I print up a copy of Oliver Twist or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, without paying Dickens or Twain, you're saying that that would be stealing and that I could not assert a free speech right against the state if they tried to shut me down? News to me.
Those books are public domain because their copyright has expired. You're free to print em, change em, do anything you want. If, however, you try re-printing a more current book, you'd be breaking the law. If you print multiple copies and try to distribute for free or a nominal cost, you'll get shut down.
Copyright is utilitarian through and through, and can be thought of best as a means of exploiting authors for the benefit of the public.
Without copyright, everyone is going to download the book for $0 and the author will go broke wasting years of his/her life for nothing. Even with moderately selling books, the author benefits using a publisher (ebook) who gives 50-70% of total sales to the author. Traditional book publishers only pay 5-15%, similar to your dairy farmer/cow analogy.
Those books are public domain because their copyright has expired. You're free to print em, change em, do anything you want.
So I guess I do have a free speech right to copy works made by other people. Since the expiration of copyright doesn't grant me any rights, but merely removes rights that had been granted to the author, and since it's rather odd to claim that free speech is a right which flows from the state to the people, I guess I must have the same right even as to copyrighted works. Copyright infringes on my right while it subsists, but there doesn't appear to be any other way of making sense of this.
Oh, and BTW, Oliver Twist was never copyrighted in the US; we didn't grant foreign authors copyrights until much later. I just chose those works because the authors hated people copying their work, legally or not.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Why are certain voluntary agreements between individuals valid, but others are considered "artificial"?
You lost me at "voluntary". When did Amazon volunteer to either pay 43% more than Apple for the same book *or* charge the same 43% markup as Apple? Amazon only charges a 25% markup on average on paper books, even though Amazon usually ends up eating the shipping on those. The agency model resulted in the rather ridiculous result of paper books being cheaper than ebooks.
You ask what a fair price would be. Amazon thought that a fair wholesale price for an ebook was the same price they were paying for the paper book, either a hardcover or a paperback (once those came out). Why should they pay more for the cheaper electronic version? Admittedly printing costs are only a small portion of book prices, but they still run about a $1 a book or so. If anything wholesale ebook prices should be less than wholesale paper book prices, not more.
So others are not free to start up competing services? Who is enforcing that?
The publishers were. Each publisher has a monopoly on each book they sell.
The particular part of the agreement that the government found illegal was the setting of the price relative to Amazon's prices. Apple insisted that they pay 70% of Amazon's wholesale price or that Amazon charge the same retail price. Apple was perfectly free to set whatever prices they wanted with publishers until they based their prices on others' prices. Apple was perfectly free to charge whatever markup they wanted. The problem was that they attempted to control Amazon's markup. Since they compete with Amazon, that was price fixing.
I can understand the pay scale for hard or softcover books and I have absolutely no problem paying an author for the joy of reading their work. But, in this day and age when a transcript is supplied in digital format and generally requires little in the way of editing (I propose) just WHAT do publishers add to the price of an e-book to justify the price they charge?
One of the things I'd really like to see is how much the author gets from the sale of each book. How much do the publishers scam us for our willingness to pay almost anything to read our favourite authors?
If I get charged, say, eight bucks for an e-book just how much is going to the person who created it in the first place? I'm all for profit but cannot abide gouging.
My 2 cents :)
Amazon may be reducing its discounts, but it is NOT raising prices beyond manufacturers' (publishers') suggested retail price.
Interesting how people who were moaning because "Amazon's lower prices are undercutting brick and mortar bookstores" are now moaning that "Amazon is raising prices".
Of course, the NY TImes is a company town rag. Not surprising that they're going to echo the Big Publishing party line.
You are flogging a dead horse. Despite your skewed view on the subject, the publishers all settled with the DOJ; every single one of them. And only Apple fought. Apple lost.
Therefore, one can safely argue that you are in fact wrong in your both your assumptions and your reasoning.
You are assuming that settling is a sign that the publishers admitted guilt. In this case, they explicitly did not. Sometimes court cases are settled because one party decides it's too risky or costly to continue, even if they sincerely believe they're in the right. Courts aren't perfect at separating right from wrong, and litigants don't necessarily have infinite resources.
Amazon's $9.99 model was pushing books at a loss leader, below the wholesale price, in order to keep everyone else out of the market.
That's not entirely true.
Amazon's $9.99 model was disrupted when the publishers raised wholesale prices on e-books to the same price as printed books--above $9.99. However, Amazon continued to sell certain NYT Bestselling e-books for $9.99 as loss leaders. They did not continue to sell all of their books for $9.99. Publishers were afraid that Amazon's low pricing would affect hardcover sales, so their next plan was to delay e-book versions of popular authors--including Stephen King and Sarah Palin.
All this was conspiratorial, but Apple wasn't involved.
Basically, Apple showed up and said, "Okay, here's how you beat Amazon: You adopt our plan of the using the agency model and you switch everybody over to that model and we get the best price." Apple sold this plan to the Publishers as a way to eliminate Amazon's control over pricing. Apple pushed all of the publishers to go for this plan.
Apple knew that this was important to all of the publishers. When a reporter asked Steve Jobs why people would buy from iBookstore for $14.99 when they could buy from Amazon for $9.99, Steve Jobs replied, "Well, that won't be the case." When the reporter followed up with, "You mean you won't be $14.99 or they won't be $9.99," Jobs said, "The price will be the same." This shows Apple knew that Amazon's ability to set prices would soon be eliminated.
So Apple provided a way for the conspirators to get what they want.
There you go. This was a case of Amazon's monopoly price controls being broken by giving that control back to the several publishers. A "conspiracy" to end a monopoly should be applauded, not prosecuted.
I like to see the nutters try and grow so I'll spell it out for you. Apple "worked with" the publishers to raise prices. Both parties want prices to be raised (the customers, a third party, don't).
You make it sound as if it is significant that customers don't want prices to go up. Of course they don't. They never do. That's not a consideration in accusations of price fixing or collusion at all. Prices can and do go up without collusion. Your product takes labor to make and the price of that labor went up? Then you'd better charge more for it or you'll go into the red, and then your business won't be around for long at all.
What the publishers didn't want is to raise the prices evenly. They wanted to control which books sold and which books didn't. That let's them bully authors and get better deals on the supply side.
Ahahahahahahaha, you're dumb. That takes the cake. It's by far the looniest thing I've read in this slashdot discussion, and that's saying something. You are literally claiming that publishers want some books to sell worse than they ought to. Earth to "HeckRuler": publishers are businesses. Businesses like making money. Deliberately tanking the sales of a property which cost you money to acquire, help develop (in the form of editing, artwork, etc.), and put out for sale? That's not smart. Not in an industry which isn't drowning in money in the first place, and not even if you're playing the long game. Remember, publishers are in competition with each other to attract authors. Treat an author wrong and they'll happily jump ship to someone who does better by them.
The only authors I could see a publisher targeting for such behavior are ones who aren't successful yet, i.e. there's a low probability of their book doing well. But guess what? The reason publishers take a flier on new authors in the first place is that they hope to develop every one they sign up into a bigger name. And if a publisher deliberately tanks those books, well guess what? That author isn't as likely to catch on and become profitable. And if they do, that author will jump ship once they don't have to put up with the shit, and then the publisher will be left with nothing.
Apple wanted the prices to rise across the board for a variety of reasons.
I'm pretty sure Apple didn't care much about the actual price point so long as Apple got to offer the same price as anybody else, and got a 30% cut of it no matter what the price was. Those are, after all, the terms which Apple offered and the publishing industry accepted. Not "thou shalt hike prices!!!".
Apple "forced" publishers to raise prices across the board, against their best interest.
Nonsense bullshit. Apple gave them a pricing model in which they -- not Apple -- set the prices consumers would actually pay. And Apple didn't have to use any force; publishers greatly preferred it to the squeeze Amazon was putting on them.
Apple did this, most probably, through the force of business. IE, do it or we won't play along and prices will stay low and you lose a buck.
The only way you can say this is by being wholly ignorant of the facts of the case. Which are that publishers greatly feared the monopoly and monopsony power Amazon was building, and wanted a way to stop Amazon's practice of dumping (selling eBooks below cost in order to establish and maintain monopoly control). Apple offered publishers an alternate model in which the reseller (whether Apple, Amazon, or anyone else) did not set the retail price, the publisher did. Apple also offered a simple no-frills 70/30 revenue split, ensuring that both parties could make money in a sustainable way.
It's an every so slight bit of hyperbole. Akin to how a company forces people to pay high prices when they gouge after a disaster and everyone NEEDS basic commodities. Wh
Nice veiled reference to obamacare, even though I happen to agree with it.
But we have decided as a society that competition is a good thing, even if consumers maintain the right of rejection.
Therefore we punish anti-trust violations.
Amazon is not colluding. It is setting terms as a singular entity.
Our idea of a free market is having someone else to go to, so that a monopolst has more to fear than simply pissing off customers enough to go without.
An ad hominem is an insult that is also a premise.
The case had little to do with the 'correct' price of ebooks, and a whole lot to do with elimination of the word 'freely' that you used.
What freedom is removed? For a freedom to be removed, a right must be violated. Which right is being violated by these voluntary agreements between individuals? The right to affordable ebooks?
After the agreement with Apple, the publisher set the price that the consumer paid. Not really anything wrong with that (yet). However, the publishers were still using the retailers to 'sell' the books, but the retailers were no longer able to set the price they asked.
If that is the agreement that retailers voluntarily agreed to abide by, why is it anyone's concern? Do the retailers have a right to sell a company's product at whatever asking price they want, regardless of what they agreed in the contract? Why is such a voluntary contractual obligation a violation of anyone's rights or freedoms?
Why should an agreement that Apple has with a publisher to collect 30% on every sale force Amazon to also take a 30% cut?
How does a voluntary agreement that Amazon makes with publishers entail force? What prevents Amazon from leaving the agreement and choosing not to sell those publishers' products?
Why should Amazon not be able to lower the price it's customers pay by taking less than a 30% cut?
Because they contractually agreed to that price. It would be a violation of their voluntary contractual agreement, and if it was a willful violation, it would be fraud.
Amazon used to be able to set the price it's customers pay, and no longer can.
Then why did they agree to that?
There no longer is any competition
What prevents Amazon or anyone else from starting up a competing publishing film, or choosing to sell the ebooks at the agreed-upon price, or to buy the physical books instead, or to use the library, or to find a similar book through a different publisher, to choose not to read the book altogether? There is plenty of competition.
those other businesses should have a say in how much they will sell the product for.
If the want that ability, why would they voluntarily enter into an agreement that doesn't give them that ability?
Books are not a fungible commodity.
Why is that relevant?
Yes, if they set the price too high people won't buy it, but that is not the issue here.
Agreed - the issue here is that folks believe that some voluntary agreements between free individuals, which do not violate any rights, should not be permitted in a free market.
Which individual right is that? The right to ebooks?
Amazon had forced on them through a near-monopoly position on e-books.
Amazon voluntarily entered into a contractual agreement - at what point was force involved? Did they have a gun held to their heads?
And now, in the end, there is more competition.
It is easy to point to the benefits of government intervention into the marketplace (e.g. "look at this wonderful bridge we built"). But it takes more thought to uncover the harm that is done to the so-called forgotten man - such as the legal barriers to entry into the marketplace that such expansive regulations create.
Welcome to modern-day America, where breaking a monopoly is itself considered to be an anti-competitive practice.
I am not arguing against antitrust laws on the grounds of a cost-benefit analysis regarding the alleged level of "competitiveness", but on the grounds of the proper role of government - the protection of individual rights. So long as no rights are violation, voluntary agreements between individuals and organizations of individuals should both be permitted and legally binding.
People are habituated to other venues by that point.
Whether or not it's a necessity doesn't matter. The issue is that they're colluding with other sellers to remove the natural competition in the market. If there's no competition, then the market will never reach the "correct" price because the equilibrium is being artificially influenced.
That's the problem with free markets, they only work in theory.
Bullshit. Go read the final judgement in that case - the publishers all explicitly admitted guilt.
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Bad example. My rule of thumb when buying guitar kit is that if you've paid more than 2/3 of the advertised price, you've been had. Comprehensively. If you're any good at negotiating, you'll be well under that 2/3 mark.
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You have an odd definition of 'voluntary'. Their 'choice' was accept the method that Apple arranged, or stop selling the books. That stretches any reasonable definition of 'voluntary'.
It is relevant that books are not fungible because you put forth the premise that you could simply start a competing publisher if you don't like this deal. You could, but you won't be able to sell the books or authors that anyone wants, so that is not a reasonable option either.
The case was about eliminating competition. Apple succeeded in doing that. It did not matter if the other retailers accepted the new deal or simply exitted the business, Apple has eliminated the competition either way. Pretty shocking that you can't see what it wrong with that.
The agreement between Apple and the publishers removed Amazon's right to set their own retail price for goods.
Because the law explicitly says the type of agreement Apple and the publishers entered into is unlawful. That's democracy for you.
Yes, they could do that. It's analogous to giving someone the choice between being shot and jumping off a cliff. When they jump, you can wash your hands - it was their choice to do it! But because we as a democratic society don't like businesses to collude in a way that reduces the competition in a marketplace, we've made it illegal.
If it was a willful violation, then it would be breach of contract. Fraud is something else.
Because the only other choice was to leave the market. They can't just say, "Fine, I won't carry your books then - you'll lose because all the other publishers are going with us," because all the publishers had made an unlawful agreement to fix the same set of prices and conditions.
Sure. Of course, all the authors are contracted to the big publishing houses, so Amazon will have to write their own books as well. The suggestion is absolutely absurd. There'd be nothing wrong with mining companies fixing prices for metals with the refineries, would there, because any car manufacturer can just go and set up their own mining arm, invest billions in exploration, dig the stuff up, set up their own processing business and produce their own steel. Then do it again for copper, aluminium, zinc, nickel, tin and gold. They're still perfectly free to make cars, right? Or there's nothing wrong with farmers fixing prices for food with the supermarkets. After all, your average New Yorker is perfectly free to buy a couple of acres of land upstate, and he has a whole two days every week to go and farm it and produce his own food if he doesn't like the supermarkets' fixed prices.
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Toward the end of the hearing, Mark Ryan, a lawyer with the Justice Department, asked if she would be able to share any of her thoughts on the case so far. Cote then gave what she called her "tentative view," which she said was based largely on material submitted as evidence - emails and correspondence that took place over a six-week period between December 2009 and January 2010. She emphasized that no final decision would be made until after the trial takes place. And she also said she had not read many of the affidavits submitted in support of the parties' positions.
so not really required by law. she could of said something like "its too early to say".
Go read the final judgement in the case. It sets out a long list of admitted facts both parties agreed to.
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No. Two wrongs don't make a right. There's nothing wrong with having a monopoly, as long as you don't abuse it to hurt consumers. Amazon, so far, hasn't. In fact they've used their monopoly to keep prices low. Collusion to raise prices is illegal and rightly so, even when it breaks a monopoly - especially when that monopoly position was not being used anti-competitively.
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Their 'choice' was accept the method that Apple arranged, or stop selling the books.
How is that choice different from any other transaction? Choose to agree to the terms of the transaction, or the transaction is not completed, and the agreement is not made. Those are the two alternatives in any free agreement between two parties.
You could, but you won't be able to sell the books or authors that anyone wants
This is begging the question. It presupposes that people will only want the books/authors from these allegedly "artificially" overpriced ebooks. If people only want those, and are willing to buy them to the point that the seller is profitable, then what is the problem? If people are unwilling to buy those, then the alternative books/authors from a competing firm - sold at a lower price - would attract buyers, and thus people will want those alternatives.
The case was about eliminating competition. Apple succeeded in doing that.
In a free market, competition is only eliminated insofar as a producer makes a product that people want, and people reward the producer with their money and continued business. If the producer begins to make a poor/overpriced product, buyers will demand an alternative, and alternatives will Why is that a bad thing? Whose rights are being violated?
Sellers CAN set their prices, but not when ALL the sellers get together and artificially raise prices. Which is what was ruled as being orchestrated by Apple.
They actually lowered their prices. Hurray for Apple.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Apple didn't either, yet was found guilty.
I meant in the end after Apple broke the Amazon monopoly, not in the end after the government intervention. All this trial has done is warn companies against trying new business models.
You seem to think that the only competition possible is between producers. This is nonsense. There is also competition between retailers. THAT is the competition that has been eliminated. Why can you not see this?
Yes, the producer (publisher) is able to set any price they want for their product. They can price themselves right out of the market. That is their call, and there is nothing wrong with it, and nobody is claiming otherwise.
However, the RETAILERS are also in competition with each other. You have not provided a single valid argument as to why retailers should not be able to compete on their own terms. If Apple wants to price themselves out of the market by adding a 30% markup while Amazon is only taking a 10% markup, that is their right. What is NOT right is arranging things so that Apple can get it's 30% cut by making sure EVERY OTHER RETAILER is prevented from undercutting them. In not one of your posts have you provided any reason why that should be tolerated.
And don't try the old 'Amazon was doing the same thing with it's low prices', because that is nonsense. What Amazon was doing made in difficult to compete with them, but that is the nature of competition. Apple was not making it 'difficult' to compete on price, they were making it impossible.
Glad to see moderation is working as it should. Mods are free to mod as they see fit.
I realise this discussion is pretty dead, but if you're still reading, I have a question for you. It might take me a few minutes to explain it. Sorry.
Reading through this whole discussion, I think what I'm seeing is that your priority in this situation is for government not to interfere wherever it is at all possible for it not to interfere. You think that government should not restrict the freedom of publishers to make agreements fixing their offering price because that is a restraint on the freedom of those publishers. You think that the free market will solve the problem because someone will see the opportunity to set up a publisher that's not part of the cartel and will undercut the cartel members. But the arrangements of the publishing industry is not what you really care about; for you, it's about government not impinging on freedom of individuals. Is that fair? It's what you might term a "very small government" position; perhaps you think the government should concern itself with a simple sort of criminal law & enforcement, foreign relations and enough taxation to support that and leave it at that? Note that I'm using "government" here to refer to all levels of government, not specifically the US Federal government.
Would it also be fair to say that you see this model of government as inherently right, as the only legitimate form of government? You use terms like "inalienable rights" and "proper role of government" in a way that seems to indicate that you don't see this as one possible model of government that might be chosen by a given society but rather the only legitimate model of government. Is that fair?
If I've read correctly and the above is a fair description of your position (at least as far as it goes), then here is my question for you: What makes that the only legitimate form of government? Why is it an intrinsically valid form of government and all other forms intrinsically invalid?
I hope that it is fairly clear to you that this is not the model of government currently in operation in the United States. The USA is a democratic constitutional republic which means that the form of government in place is whatever the people want it to be, and if enough of them can agree on a different form of government then they can change it by changing the constitution. You could easily become absolute dictator for life - all you have to do is get the right number of people to vote for a constitutional amendment that makes it so. My point is not whether this would be a good or bad thing, but that power fundamentally derives from the will of the people and the only "right" form of government is whatever form the (required majority of) people agree on. It recognises no absolute right or wrong way of doing government, only the will of the people. So I am curious about how you can claim that you know the "right" way of doing government as opposed to how government is actually practised.
I suppose it's possible that you think that the reason your model of government is the right one is because it's the model that is set out in the United States constitution and that the current incarnation of government is in fact not following the will of the people as set out in the constitution. That changes the question from, "What is the proper form of government," to a specific legal question, "Is current antitrust law set out by congress within the authority granted to congress by the constitution?" The specific legal basis of antitrust law is article 1, section 8, clause 3 of the constitution, which gives congress the power "to regulate commerce ... among the several states..." The elisions are of powers to also regulate commerce with foreign nations and with the Indian tribes. While I would generally agree that the way the commerce clause is applied goes a long way beyond the regulation of commerce (attempting to use it to regulate gun possession, violence against
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Again, back to Standard Oil. Even when Standard Oil wasn't loss-leading kerosene sales to run competition out of business, their efficiencies lowered prices for everyone.
Amazon's price controls hurt the publishers, the authors, and of course B&N which couldn't afford to loss-lead as much. The Publishers couldn't sell the books for what they wanted to, because their monopoly outlet for sales dictated prices, and they had been trying to get out from under that for years. Now they have a range of prices that they have negotiated with three separate retailers.
The market is now more free, and government intervention wasn't required. In fact, the government is punishing this market correction.
You have not provided a single valid argument as to why retailers should not be able to compete on their own terms.
They should be free to do so. They should also be free to sign agreements with producers to sell products at specific prices. Why is one free agreement valid while the other is not, if no rights are being violated?
In not one of your posts have you provided any reason why that should be tolerated.
On the contrary, I have repeatedly provided the rationale - individuals and organizations of individuals who voluntarily enter into agreements should be free to set whatever terms they would like for those agreements, so long as both parties are freely entering into the agreement, and so long as no individual rights are violated as a result of that agreement. When individuals interact in society, their only social concern should be not to violate others' rights, and the governments only concern should be to uphold and protect those rights - to protect against force, threat of force, or fraud.
You have an amazing gift for dancing around the issues. 'Yes, they should be free to do so, but because of the Apple agreement they aren't, but that is OK because they accepted the only option they had'. What kind of completely moronic logic is that?
Let's take this real slow, so you can get it.
'They should be free to do so'. Agreed. Now answer this question - ARE THEY FREE TO DO SO? The answer, obviously, is no. Their choice is either sell at a price and under conditions determined by Apple (a competitor) and the publishers, or don't sell at all. So what, exactly, are they free to do?
'They should also be free to sign agreements to sell at fixed prices'. Wrong. That is illegal, and rightly so.
This is how voluntary interaction in a free society works.
'They should also be free to sign agreements to sell at fixed prices'. Wrong.
But why is it wrong - that was the question I asked. Your only answer is "that is illegal, and rightly so" - but that begs the question. Whose rights are violated? If none, then why is it wrong?
Thanks for the info, smarty. Does it mean you're going to actually do something about it? No. Just some fine that pales in comparison to what they made from breaking that law, and zero incentive to actually stop. Just like always. Just get back to jailing kids for downloading MP3's. THOSE are the people who really need to be punished. ...
Every retail store colludes with suppliers to set prices.
Holy crap. Do you even know what the case is about? The whole fucking point of the case was that IT WAS NOT POSSIBLE for ANYONE to 'renogtiate'. Why was it not possible? Because Apple and the publishers COLLUDED with each other to ensure there would be no negotiations. The ONLY options available to the other retailers were: exit the business, or agree to the terms we set up with Apple. Period. Knock it off with the 'voluntarily agreed to crap'. There was nothing voluntary about it.
Whose rights get violated when one party signs an agreement with another party that says everyone else gets screwed? Everyone else.
I guess you have no problem with the idea of total and complete monopoly control of everything, because that is exactly what this is. Sure, it may give the appearance that there are multiple competitors, but when they are all forced to sell for the same price or exit the business the effect is exactly the same as a 100% monopoly. Why is that wrong? Because the people of the country say that it is wrong, regardless of libertarian rantings.
Soooo.... shouldn't Amazon be free to set whatever price they choose for what they sell? But, oh, wait, Apple colluded with publishers to set up a market that forced a particular price on Amazon.
At least one publishers offered Amazon to keep using the Wholesale model for ebooks with changed sales windows - they refused. Instead they stopped selling their ebooks and books. IOW it was Amazon who initiated using force.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Whose rights get violated when one party signs an agreement with another party that says everyone else gets screwed?
I did not ask "whose rights" - I asked what specific right is violated. Name the right.
There was nothing voluntary about it.
So point to the specific force that was applied to Amazon. Point to the specific agreement they were forced to sign, and name the specific means of force that was used against them - for example a gun, a baseball bat, a threat of violence, etc. If the choice was not voluntary on both sides, then it should be possible to indicate the source of the force, as with any other situation where someone is forced to do something against his will.
I guess you have no problem with the idea of total and complete monopoly control of everything, because that is exactly what this is.
As I said previously, so long as buyers freely choose a company's products, and no rights are violated, then what concern is it whether everyone chooses to buy from one company, and no other companies are able to offer a better/cheaper product? If the so-called "monopoly" company begins to produce an inferior product, or sell at higher prices than buyers are willing to accept, then competition will arise. In reality, all real examples of "monopolies" are those organizations which have colluded with the government to forcibly ban the existence of competition on threat of violence, imprisonment, etc - e.g. local utilities, ISPs in certain areas, the Federal Reserve, etc.
when they are all forced to sell for the same price or exit the business
"Exit the business" - what does that mean, exactly? Amazon is no longer allowed to exist? No longer allowed to sell ebooks? No longer allowed to sell any books? Or does it just mean Amazon is not allowed to sell certain books from publishers who abide by Apple's agreement?
Why is that wrong? Because the people of the country say that it is wrong
That is not an explanation - that is an observation about a conclusion arrived at by specific individuals (which?). By what rationale did those individuals arrive at that conclusion?
So I guess I do have a free speech right to copy works made by other people.
According to wikipedia, this is Free Speech, Article 11:
The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.
Freedom of speech is meant to give you freedom to speak your mind, say unpopular things, etc. As noted above, it does not give you permission to abuse the law: abuses such as copyright violation, hate speech, etc. That is, free speech does not give you right to infringe on the rights of others, specifically, authors and publishers' right to profit from their literary works.
Copyrighted works don't fall under freedom of speech because they are already widely available for a very low price -- so it's already virtually free. Copying and distributing copyrighted works has very little to do with freedom of speech -- that copyrighted material is not yours to distribute. So stop coming up with lame excuses to steal property for free.
According to wikipedia, this is Free Speech, Article 11:
The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.
Wow.
You know, I like the French Revolution as much as anyone, and these days, with all the corruption, abuse, and incompetence in our politics, financial institutions, industry, and so on, maybe it would be a good idea to set up and use some guillotines in Washington, in our capitals, on Wall Street, etc., pour encourager les autres.
But what you quoted there is not a general definition of a natural right of free speech. Instead, you quoted from the French Declaration of the Rights of Man from August, 1789. It's deeply ironic that you would post that given that the French had just abolished copyright law early in the previous month and wouldn't get around to establishing a new general copyright law until 1793 IIRC. (There were a couple of laws regarding performing plays as early as 1791, but they mainly seem to have been concerned with breaking down monopolies)
So leaving fun-filled France behind, maybe instead of going to Wikipedia and just using the first thing you saw on the page that looked like you could quote it, let's at the very least look to see if there was a part of the very same damn Wikipedia page that you could have quoted instead, had you bothered to read even a tiny bit further. How about this:
In Areopagitica, published without a license,[John] Milton made an impassioned plea for freedom of expression and toleration of falsehood, stating:
"Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties"
Based on John Milton's arguments, freedom of speech is understood as a multi-faceted right that includes not only the right to express, or disseminate, information and ideas, but three further distinct aspects:
the right to seek information and ideas;
the right to receive information and ideas;
the right to impart information and ideas
Here in the US, we took a fairly strong stance on this early on, at least on paper, with the First Amendment guaranteeing this (pre-existing, natural right):
Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press
And while some prominent figures support the idea of an absolute guarantee of free speech (Hugo Black, William O Douglas), the problem is that most people and most governments formed by those people, are pussies about it. So instead of at least taking an absolutist starting position and then maybe (but hopefully not) nibbling away at it, often one sees things like the sort of language you approvingly quoted, in which people are guaranteed free speech as long as it isn't the slightest bit inconvenient for those in power.
Anyway, though, the presence of utterly hypocritical and utterly repulsive pro-censorship language in guarantees of free speech still doesn't support your position. After all, free speech is an inherent right. It isn't granted by the state. And if the state infringes on it in a way that it claims is legal, that doesn't make it any less of an infringement. Whether a state oppresses its people a little or a lot, it's always the same thing.
That is, free speech does not give you right to infringe on the rights of others, specifically, authors and publishers' right to profit from their literary works.
No. There is no natural right to a copyright. A copyright is inherently, inescapably, censorship. It's a power of censorship that the state grants to a copyright holder, rather than exercising for itself, and it's a power used for avaricious purposes, rather than the more common purpose of securing and maintaining political power; but at
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The retailer is not restricted from selling at a lower price, they are just not allowed to advertise the lower price. Big difference.
It still seems pretty rotten to me, and I don't understand how they get away with it. The intent is to present to the consumer a fixed price, and not every consumer will know about the non-advertised price. They are clearly trying to reduce competitive pricing.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324879504578597883383524650.html
-- I speak only for myself
"There's no ground to plant it on"
Need I remind you that we are talking about books which are written by individuals. Find small-time writers who are trying to find a break, give them the means to publish and distribute, and there you have it.