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.

Comments

Anyone know how the voting went?

[rsilvergun]

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...

Maybe now ebooks will be cheaper then paper?

[dczyz]

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.

Yet another reason not to do business with Apple

[jbn-o]

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.

Apple did this for a reason.

[tlambert]

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.