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Supreme Court Rejects Apple eBooks Price-Fixing Appeal (reuters.com)
chasm22 writes: The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear Apple Inc's challenge to an appellate court decision that it conspired with five publishers to increase e-book prices, meaning it will have to pay $450 million as part of a settlement. The court's decision not to hear the case leaves in place a June 2015 ruling by the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that found Apple liable for engaging in a conspiracy that violated federal antitrust laws. Apple, in asking the high court to hear the case, said the June appeals court decision that the company had conspired with the publishers contradicted Supreme Court precedent and would "chill innovation and risk-taking." The 2nd Circuit's ruling followed a 2013 decision by U.S. District Judge Denise Cote that Apple played a "central role" in a conspiracy with publishers to raise e-book prices. The Justice Department said the scheme caused some e-book prices to rise to $12.99 or $14.99 from the $9.99 price previously charged by market leader Amazon.com Inc. "Apple liability for knowingly conspiring with book publishers to raise the prices of e-books is settled once and for all," said Bill Baer, head of the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust division.
Perhaps Congress should change the price fixing laws... What about Amazon? Just trying to anticipate the response from Apple.
Perhaps Congress should change the price fixing laws... What about Amazon? Just trying to anticipate the response from Apple.
I'm wondering if Scalia's death caused them to lose. Apple was probably counting on his vote when they first agreed to pursue the litigation instead of settling for $70 mil. It's amazing how much of affect SCOTUS has. Probably too much...
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Perhaps Congress should change the price fixing laws...
There aren't really "price-fixing laws." The Sherman Anti-Trust act prohibits "restraint of trade," which is written by Congress to allow courts to develop antitrust law however they want. Technically every contract made could be "restraint of trade," but the courts generally only apply it to certain pretty explicit anti-competitive behavior, such as explicit price-fixing with competitors. You are still allowed to do other things which discourage competition, like integrating vertically within an industry.
That would be a nice change. Its the biggest reason why I dont really read many ebooks. I can get the paperback version much - much cheaper then the ebook version.
Any how much of this will trickle down to the people whom bought books from Apple while prices were being fixed?
Is it too much to dream that consumers who are victims of corporate mis-understandings of the law to be refunded for what should not have been charged for every purchase? In this universe, on this planet, at this time... sadly yes it is to much to ask for all ill gotten gains to be un-gained.
1) a tree died to make the book
2) fuel was used to transport the tree to the paper mill
3) electricity was used to pulp the paper
4) more electricity used to print and bind the book
5) fuel used to transport the book to the store
6) more fuel used to go get the book from the store
that is *really* selfish of you and all for a few extra bucks
It's just like *Happily ever after*
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Apple makes so much money yet has such an ugly history of mistreating the people with whom they do business in a variety of ways large and small: Mistreatment of workers who build their products (continuing in 2015 only changing due to activist and journalists compelling them to), copyright infringement, ebooks that won't work on jailbroken iThings, turning a blind eye to environmental degradation, making it needlessly hard for owners to take apart their products, teaching store staff twisted psychological manipulation, avoiding US corporate tax (which is already quite low), and more. Now we can add conspiring to fix prices. Hardly surprising given how unethical, illegal, and pernicious Apple has been.
Digital Citizen
Apple did this for a reason. It's not the reason people are claiming.
The problem is that the text to speech that's disabled by the DRM on eBooks means that blind people can't read eBooks. Or of they get an audio book for an eBook, it always comes a lot later, and at a much higher price, if at all.
There's no reason for this, but in order to get the DRM removed, they kind of need to be able to cut the same kind of deal with the eBook publishers that they cut with the music labels to get the DRM the hell off of music.
What this is about is that Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and the now-defunct Borders, make a large amount of money on the margins on the audio books. Mostly on the backs of people who listen to them while they drive or exercise -- or on the backs of the disabled.
Mod-martyrs always deserve their downmods. No exceptions.
Much good as Richard has done in bringing the world emacs and being one of the most prominent and effective advocates for free software, one thing you can not accuse Richard Stallman of is being unbiased , balanced and fair in his critique.
Most of what you site is either directly from Richard's site, or merely quoting it. Some, not all of this has been widely discredited, or the headlines are contradicted by the very articles that are cited.
So taking factory conditions from one of the articles you cite, as an example :
"This is very far from being only Apple's problem, of course. Foxconn manufactures parts for just about every other consumer tech firm too (the company's most recent corporate social responsibility report from 2010 cites 935,000 employees, so it is enormous), including HP, Sony-Ericsson, Amazon and Dell. It makes the Kindle and Wii as well as iPhones and iPads, and until recently made Xbox consoles."
Does any one of those other manufacturers provide a supplier responsibility report that is comparable in detail to what Apple provides, and your activists and journalists quote from ?
Now it depends on your accusations is around the existance of the issues versus relative uniqueness of the issues with respect to Apple. If you drill down on it, they have their good points, and bad points, but they are better than many of their competitors on many of the issues you cite by a significant margin.
There is ugliness in all large organisations. Why ? Because if you put enough people in a room, there will be a fair chunk of arsehats.
I don't understand how Apple fixed prices. It's not like two different book makers sell the same book. Apple just let the book owner set the price. Amazon dictates prices. Just because they sell for lower now is no indication they will sell lower later. One can see how they used their marketplace power to cow some publishers into selling at a lower price. This can be used for good or evil. It's not the same as competition which is what the apple model used.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Amazon cannot fix ebook prices. Other sellers, publishers are free to sell at the price that they want. People will buy where they get the ebooks that they want at the best prices. Yes, Amazon has a big head start on the others, but they are not a monopoly, nor are they colluding with other sellers to fix prices.
All of that having been said, publishers are keeping ebook prices higher than they should be, considering that they are as high if not higher in many cases than the mass-market paperback price, yet cost much, much, much less to produce per copy!
Or do they just need one or two justices to agree to hear the case?
Reminds me of the Walter Block joke.
There are three prisoners in the U.S. They were all in jail for economic crimes of violating monopoly laws. First guy said that he charged higher prices than anyone else and the government then accused him of price gouging and profiteering. Second guy charged lower prices than anyone else and they accused him of predatory and cutthroat pricing. And the third guy said that he charged the same prices as everyone else and they accused him of collusion and price fixing.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
A couple of things...
I do not moderate -- ever. Even though I can, I do not. I have my reasons.
Moderators can moderate however they see fit. You do not get to tell them how to spend their points.
Get an account if you don't want to be rate-limited.
While they both are about Apple, your comment is off-topic, at best. Trolling at worst. You were +1 at the time, that's overrated.
I do notice a trend. You seem to think others are obligated to behave in a manner that suits you - without regards for others feel on the subject. You seem to think you've got both power and insight. You seem to have an ego larger than its worth. You don't get to decide how someone moderates your post. You don't get to pick how often you're allowed to post. You don't get to change the subject to what you want to discuss as opposed to the topic.
In short, you're basically saying, "Don't tell me what to do." While, at the same time, saying, "Do what I say." Whatever makes you think you're entitled to be given consideration? I can assure you, you're not special nor are you in charge. You're a guest on someone else's hardware, act like it.
Well, act like it if you want to be heard. Just get a damned account if you want your posts seen.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Yes, the list of why not to do business with Apple comes from Richard Stallman's personal site stallman.org. There are other articles there too like why not to do business with Amazon, and an updated list of other pointers to political stories.
As to your question: it seems you failed to see that the /. story headline comment already predicted the sycophantic distraction of trying to dilute responsibility with 'what about other manufacturers' excuses. Other manufacturers aren't responsible for Apple's choices, Apple is.
Digital Citizen
BTW... if you don't think that, for example, Amazon, would be perfectly happy to load other people's eBooks on the Kindle, and then make them look not as nicely formatted as the ones you buy from Amazon, if that meant selling a Kindle, and enabling future Amazon sales as a result -- think again.
And don't think that B&N wouldn't do exactly the same thing to a Nook: it's more important to them that your library be portable *to* a Nook, than it is that they themselves might accident have book sales that were displayed on a Kindle instead of a Nook.
Where Amazon and B&N agree however, is this: Apple is better at presentation graphics than either of them, and so they might not be able to sell their readers any more. The readers (at present, thanks to DRM) are all about having a loss leader that then results in future book sales (which they might or might not get anyway, if they were DRM free), but the DRM means that once you commit to a vendor, you commit to their ecosystem. It's about customer lock-in.
Their worst nightmare may well be people buying books from them, and deciding to read them on their iPad (which they can do with Apps from both companies anyway), and then having to compete on book price, which is a race to lower margins, if someone decides to hold a price war.
Apple isn't the danger -- it's not like Apple gives discounts on most things anyway -- it's that Amazon and B&N are afraid of each other for that reason.
It's a mess which was (somewhat) on its way to being fixed until this case was raised.
The fact is, Apple broke up Amazon's monopoly in that market. The charge was bullshit from the get-go.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What KGIII said +plus+ don't take it so personally. Especially since you post as a very impersonal Anonymous Coward. Besides, it could be that someone was trying to up-mod you and just down-moded you by accident; it is easy to do given the way the mod selections are arranged in the mod dropdown: underrated is right below overratted, for example. I think they should be rearranged so that all the up mods are at the bottom [or top] and all the down mods are at the top [or bottom]. And once done it can't be easily corrected. When I err that way I usually just say, 'fuck em'.
Lol. I picked one of your links at random - the Gizmodo article about what apple teaches it's store staff. "Emotional and psychological manipulation" is a fucking laugh. It's typical sales tactics, like any other retail store. To make it out like Apple is perpetuating some kind of crime against humanity... Well, I simply can't take your outrage seriously.