Slashdot Mirror
Court Bars Apple From Making Industry-Wide E-book Deals
itwbennett writes "The federal judge presiding over the U.S. electronic books case against Apple has barred the company from striking deals that would ensure that it could undercut prices of other retailers in the e-book market and also prohibited Apple from letting any one publisher know what deals the company is striking up with other publishers. For its part, Apple said it plans to appeal the ruling (PDF), denying that it conspired to fix ebook pricing. Meanwhile, Amazon is alerting customers of their potential payout, which could be as much as $3.82 for every eligible Kindle book."
There's nothing illegal about being by far the largest e-book publisher. There is something illegal about conspiring with the majority of an industry to collude in price fixing. Also, I'm amazed at the gall of being upset that an illegal conspiracy against customers is actually leading to said customers being compensated.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Barnes and Noble is also notifying their nook owners about the payout.
Apple has been robbed of justice. Amazon is behind this and they are the ones that should be convicted!
Robbed of justice? You know that one of the reasons they were convicted were that they had an email from Steve Jobs confirming illegal price fixing?
So why do you think Amazon is willing to sell ebooks at a loss?
Do you think they just love their customers or maybe if they can drive their competitors out of business they can raise prices later?
Really? That is what apple said? The publishers were unhappy with Amazon discounting the books for a while but were unable to do anything individually. Apple came around and said we can work on this with you. The 5 publishers all got on-board and then gave amazon an ultimatum. change your model to agency or be excluded from the market.
Apple also said this:
'We'll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30 percent, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that's what you want anyway.'"
See the part where Jobs acknowledged the customer (thats you and me) pays more?
Is that how competition should work?
Not correct at all. The rules stated that if any other retailer sold the book for less than what Apple was, Apple could change their price and take it out of the publisher's percentage. Apple was all about protecting their 30% and not actually competing as a retailer.
According to Jobs they were not cheaper:
'We'll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30 percent, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that's what you want anyway.'"
Apple always seem to do so well in court. The timeframe has dropped to 10 years to five. The remedies to include "music, movies, television shows or other content," all gone. Apple having to allow Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others to sell content through links to their own stores in their iOS apps, thereby avoiding Apple's 30 per cent tariff.
Apple is not going to be concerned about a few $. It is becoming increasingly necessary for content to move cross platform easily, without being treated as a criminal for removing trivial DRM, for all content and I include Applications. There is no technical reason for this today.
Actually apple came in and offered a way to break the amazon monopoly.
Apple Didn't offer DRM free ebooks at lower prices than Amazon...you know compete. Apple formed a price fixing cartel with publishers which is bad for consumers, and removing the ability to compete with Apple(Even if you are not buying Apple products)...the reason why Monopolises are bad.
Steve Jobs should have gone to jail.
You weren't paying attention at all. Ebook prices went up after the iBooks thing started, both from Apple and Amazon.
That's the first hint that something shitty is going on, when you have more competitors in a market and yet the price goes up.
The payout is a separate thing that's a result of the settlements the DoJ struck with the publishers last year. It's part of the same issue, but it was settled out of court and wasn't part of this case.
For this ruling, the judge is barring Apple from engaging in "most favored nation" clauses (i.e. "our store will always have the lowest price for your product, or will be tied for having the lowest price") and is forcing them to stagger re-negotiations with the various publishers over the next few years in order to ensure that no collusion occurs. As I understand it, and I may be mistaken, they are not barred from engaging in agency model deals (i.e. "you get to set the price and we'll take X% cut"), which was actually a large part of what led to the price increase in the first place. Prior to that, the industry standard was the wholesale model (i.e. "we negotiate a price that you sell the book to us for, but then we can sell it to consumers for whatever")
Personally, I think the lawsuit was rather ridiculous, since Amazon was poised to destroy the entire industry, and the shift to the agency model was a necessary one to ensure the long-term health of the industry. Prior to Apple showing up with iBooks, Amazon was in a position to leverage its monopsony on the eBook market (like a monopoly, except it's when someone commands the buying side of the market, rather than the selling side) to force the publishers' hands and demand lower and lower wholesale prices. The publishers recognized the threat that posed them, so they worked out an agency deal instead, which led to lower short-term profits (despite the increased cost to consumers, simply because the agency model took a bigger cut than the wholesale model was at the time), but provided them with long-term control over their own prices.
Effectively, they took away Amazon's ability to do what was best for itself at the expense of the industry as a whole. After all, Amazon wins by lowering prices regardless of what happens to the publishers: by forcing them out it becomes the de facto publisher for virtually all eBooks thanks to its self-publishing tools, and by lowering their prices to unsustainable levels it pleases consumers and locks some of them into its ecosystem through the proprietary .azw and .kf8 eBook formats. Had the publishers been colluding to increase profits by gouging customers, I'd definitely be in support knocking them around for antitrust stuff, but the fact that they were making less money per unit sold under the agency model tells me that this was a long-term play to stay alive, rather than a short-term one to turn a quick buck at the expense of the consumer, and as such, the DoJ should have left it alone, even if it did increase the cost to consumers.
(Admitted lack of citation: I did read in multiple places over the last few months that profits were down under the agency model, but I'm knocking this comment out quickly, so I don't have time to look them up. Sorry. Doubters and welcome to doubt.)
Personally, I think the lawsuit was rather ridiculous, since Amazon was poised to destroy the entire industry,
Ignoring your waffle. By Industry you mean "bleeding customers" by Middle Men who are desperate to remain relevant post paper. Raising ebooks prices has been *damaging* to the ebook industry. Hopefully these parasites will become obsolete one day, how they treat authors is appalling. hopefully we will see a rise in self publishing.
mobile apps are generally still created for their walled garden before more open platform even though it has a falling market share
Android has a larger market for Applications with Apple having only 900,000 Apps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_App_Store vs Androids Play store http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Play 1+ million apps and the gap is going to get wider. The iphone is none existent in some markets, so no developers in those markets create iphone apps. The iphone also uses legacy hardware, and no gaming platform where android has many consoles, and cutting edge devices. The days of iOS exclusive or even first is long gone. Apple is in real trouble if they don't get the launch on the 10th right.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
I didn't say there was. Just that they have a monopoly in the ebook market, which is clear and true and definitely not illegal.
No, it's nonsense.
Amazon used to have around 90% of the US e-book market. Now it's more like 60%, though if B&N continues its long suicide, their market share will probably rise again.
Outside America, they have far more competitors, so I'd expect market share to be even lower.
It sounds right to me until you get to the 'profits spiraling down' part. Because Amazon pays the publisher the same amount no matter what the price. And yes, it does sound right to me because it's the wholesale model. If I want to just give away my stuff, I can. If I want to sell it at ridiculously low prices I can. If I want to sell milk or gas at a loss to get you into my store, where I'll make a tidy profit off of other things, I can. Amazon is doing something akin to the last thing here. They had a small number of books acting as loss leaders. Now, if they were engaging in dumping, that might be a concern, but they weren't. And even if they were, the answer is not to illegally collude with Apple to make prices rise again. The answer is to go to court against Amazon. Apparently, the feds were looking into Amazon and found their business operation perfectly legal. They also realized later that Apple was doing naughty, naughty things with the other publishers, and then they got in trouble.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Worse, because Amazon was acting like an efficiency monopoly, not a coercive monopoly. It's like complaining about Google's dominance in search when it was due entirely to being better.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Seems like Apple is getting let off very easy after carefully organizing the screwing-over of consumers.
So they get to try this again in 5 years?
And shouldn't the solution be forward looking? Is Apple actually doing the same thing with movies or other content besides books now and getting away with it?
What should also be legal, is for publishers to say "you cannot sell my book for less than $X". Amazon can sell books for any price they like, down to $0, and the publisher cannot complain. Does that sound right to you? It means if a publisher irks Amazon, they can send book profits spiraling down.
No, it's fine. The publishers set a wholesale price they were happy with, and which they turned them a profit. Amazon paid it, then sold at a lower retail price than the publishers wanted. Ebook profits for publishers were never in jeopardy.
-- 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.
Well, he has the advantage of the fact that five major publishers realized that this was blatant price fixing and settled out of court because they knew they had absolutely no case.
And the fact that Steve Jobs sent out an e-mail that was so damning of Apple's behavior that a representative of one of the publishers they were colluding with called the act of sending such an e-mail "stupid".
And the fact that the court already ruled pretty clearly that Apple is guilty and Apple have not presented any facts that lead anyone to believe anything to the contrary.
Sometimes your bias toward a company can prevent you from seeing truths that are obvious to people who don't hold those biases. When it comes to predictions, I will always take the ones that make the most rational sense and that come from people that don't have an outstanding bias towards or against a company.