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Apple Agrees To $450 Million Ebook Antitrust Settlement
An anonymous reader writes: Last year, a U.S. District Judge ruled that Apple conspired with publishers to control ebook prices in violation of antitrust laws. Apple launched an appeal which has yet to conclude, but they've now agreed to a settlement. If the appeal verdict goes against Apple, they will be on the hook for $450 million, most of which will go to consumers. If they win the appeal, they'll still have to pay $70 million. $450 million is much more than the other publishers had to pay, but much less than the expected penalty from a damages trial set for August (and still only about one percent of Apple's annual profit).
For a company which makes billions (and has probably made enough profit from this endeavour to justify the fine) fines like this mean nothing. Until people start getting jailed like normal people would do things like this will continue to happen. You can bet your ass if a CEO got 5 years in jail that company wouldn't set a single foot wrong after that for fear of it happening again.
Yeah, much better to let Amazon to run all the book publishers out of business. :rolleyes:
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
The thing I haven't seen addressed (and probably never will) is exactly how much money Apple was able to make from this. My guess is that they benefited far more than 450 million dollars from this. So if that is the case, why would they not do the same thing again since they came out ahead in the long run? You can't make the penalty less than what the company made by breaking the law, as it just becomes a cost of doing business at that point. If they don't get caught they make a boatload of money and if they do get caught they just make less money (but still make money).
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
You don't have to eliminate all possibility of profit for the fines to be an effective disincentive ... you just have to reduce profit to the point where engaging in different kinds of business or modifying business practices becomes more profitable than the alternative.
So what does that come out to?
They sell something like 800 million books a year:
http://www.digitalbookworld.co...
Multiple that by 9,000 per infringement:
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/...
A conservative estimate would have them owing:
7,200,000,000,000
Or if you don't want to count the 0's: 7.2 trillion dollars.
I think they should fork over the 7.2 trillion; that'll teach them a lesson.
It appears that one key to Apple's rocketing "success" under Jobs was that he knew he was dying soon and burned bridges left and right in order to grab as much early-mover market-share as possible to gain leveraging power for Apple.
People couldn't blame his bad moves on Apple itself because the dude behind it would be worm-bait when it all came out such that the reputation of the company wouldn't take such a huge hit. He was a voluntary shock-absorber.
We also have the employee "poaching" situation in addition to this Ebook move. I bet more will come out someday.
One has to give Jobs credit for using every weapon at his disposal, including death. His slimebaggery was masterful chess (except maybe for ignoring doctors).
Table-ized A.I.
I'll bite... this whole ebook antitrust issue is a joke. the whole point of Apple's ebook efforts was to provide a bulwark against the Amazon Ultron-like eater-of-worlds mopolistic behavior. It was a last ditch effort from apple and the publishers to try and prevent Amazon from eating and owning the entire author and book industry, from writing books to editing them to printing them to selling them.
the irony of course is that Amazon is the one that pushed the DOJ in the first place, and that an "independent" lawyer involved on the plaintiff's side does a lot of work for amazon and even works out of Amazon's building.
this whole ebooks trial is like DOJ partnering with M$ to crush OS/2. Welome to the monoculture, I hope your book industry shaped exclusively on five star reviews.
Yes, the DOJ should totally prosecute the theoretical future anti-trust actions by Amazon, while ignoring the actual increase in prices brought about by market manipulation of Apple. :rolleyes.
The future is here: http://www.slate.com/articles/...
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Regardless of what you think of Amazon and them being a monopoly, Apple colluded with publishers to raise the price of ebooks. It was anti-competitive at it's core and it's illegal under US law. Not to even mention that it cost the average US buyer $5 per book.
The only joke was that it took them more than 5 years to sue over it because everyone buying ebooks at the time noticed the dramatic $5 price increase in all books. After the Apple deal there were many ebooks that cost MORE than the paper book.
Companies don't pay fines until their less than the profit made from the behavior. It's scary to think how much money Apple must have made off fixing the markets.
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the whole point of Apple's ebook efforts was to provide a bulwark against the Amazon Ultron-like eater-of-worlds mopolistic behavior.
It was replacing one monopoly with another, in fact the Apple case was worse because it was Apple setting the baseline price and forcing publishers to sell at or above that price, Amazon did not collude with publishers to create a cartel like Apple tried to do.
The Amazon situation is bad, but Apple's cartel was worse.
Sadly for you, the "facts" are on Amazon's side here. Apple was being legally outcompeted, and resorting to illegal collusion needs to be smacked down, regardless of how much they hated seeing their potential marketshare slipping away. Maybe they should have tried to compete by lowering prices further, rather than raising them? Would be a better outcome for consumers.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
the difference is Amazon is dumping ebooks on the market at a price that is impossible to compete. 100% guaranteed they will sell books for 99 cents until all other parties are dead, then jack up the price while freezing the publishers out. This is how monopolies operate.
the whole point of Apple's ebook efforts was to provide a bulwark against the Amazon Ultron-like eater-of-worlds mopolistic behavior. It was a last ditch effort from apple and the publishers to try and prevent Amazon from eating and owning the entire author and book industry, from writing books to editing them to printing them to selling them.
so your whole argument is that it was okay for apple to commit a crime to thwart amazon from becoming more successful? if amazon ended up breaking laws, so be it, and let them stand accountable at that point.
apple isn't some angel coming down from on high to protect the poor little ebook authors. they were simply trying to thwart a competitor from becoming dominant in the field. they wanted a (larger) piece of the pie, and they broke the law trying to get it.
the irony of course is that Amazon is the one that pushed the DOJ in the first place, and that an "independent" lawyer involved on the plaintiff's side does a lot of work for amazon and even works out of Amazon's building.
i don't think you understand what irony means.
not too much perhaps. how hard is it to write a book, how hard is it to edit a book, how hard is it to curate the book industry so the most promising books recieve support and funding, how hard is it to build an industry that supports authors so they can live and work and be professionals, so the entire publishing industry doesnt devolve into 99 cent fan fic? pretty darn hard.
Damn right an Apple monopoly was the worse situation - I can read my Kindle books on Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows and a whole load of other platforms. Where can I read my Apple iBooks? Uhm... iOS.
If Apple and publishers wanted to attack Amazon's monopoly position, there is a legal mechanism to do so. That they chose a mechanism that make them all an enormous amount of money should tell you something about whose side they're on, and it's not yours.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Having done this twice, I can say that it's trickier than you'd think if you want to do anything but a long string of text. The tools for publishing ebooks are in the stone-age, and files still require a lot of manual tweaking (first time out I gave up on automated tools and wrote the entire thing by hand to the spec). Then you have the various rules of distributers and their buggy validators, which means the process can be very time-consuming.
Same as all software. AmIRight?
Just like people called for with Microsoft a number of years back, Apple should be broken up into a content-providing company and a hardware manufacturer. Their eBook intiatives that are being scrutinized now were a clear attempt to tie up and monopolize the ebook industry. Fair play would dictate that the people calling for Microsoft to be 'broken up' should be calling for the same for Apple.
Then maybe I could run MacOS on my Acer.
Uhhh..spin it how you want but the emails showed beyond a doubt that Apple was price fixing and sorry, that is illegal. Also if you think Apple was price fixing "for good of the people"....BWA HA HA HA HA, that is damned funny, it was to increase their share and make sure no competitor could undercut them, again going against free market competition.
Of course they could always do like Amazon and take less profit per sale...ha ha ha, who am I kidding, Apple take less? never!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Wrong
the whole point of Apple's ebook efforts was to provide a bulwark against the Amazon Ultron-like eater-of-worlds mopolistic behavior.
It was replacing one monopoly with another, in fact the Apple case was worse because
... Apple was never anywhere near a monopoly - and that's obviously the worst kind of monopoly.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I'm curious as to where you read that. My understanding is that book prices rose, by 30-50%.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?