DOJ

We’ve already reported that Judge Denise Cote will hold a conference on Friday afternoon to discuss the DOJ and Apple’s extravagantly punitive and lenient (respectively) proposals for how she should enforce her guilty verdict against Apple. But first, by 10:00 Thursday morning, Judge Cote wants to hear further from Apple in writing — specifically on one of their four planned avenues of appeal. She has directed Apple to spell out “the evidence it believes was ‘improperly admitted, excluded or disregarded” during the trial. The filing containing Apple’s other arguments in the expected request to stay all proceedings pending an appeal […]

There was abundant coverage of the Department of Justice’s proposed penalties against Apple following the finding of guilt in the ebook pricing trial but as far as we can tell no other outlet — even within trade publishing — has focused on the astounding elements of those proposals with respect to book publishing. In practical terms, Justice is asking Judge Cote to throw out the essential conditions of the signed settlements already agreed to with book publishers, to be replaced with far harsher and longer lasting conditions. The two important limitations on the original publisher settlements were a two-year limit […]

A deal is a deal except when it isn’t, apparently, as the Department of Justice has asked Judge Denise Cote to essentially throw out the settlement terms she already approved and ratified for Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster (and is about to issue final orders on for Macmillan and Penguin) — and impose a harsher set of selling conditions on the publishers as part of the “punishment” of Apple following Judge Cote’s finding of guilt. They now want five years of no agency at all for ebooks at Apple, with the expressed hope that those terms spread […]

Mainstream media has been scrambling to come up with some kind of impact for consumers related to Judge Denise Cote’s verdict against Apple handed down Wednesday morning, but for now there really isn’t any. (For a refresher, we had looked in early June at what the government said it would want from Apple if they prevailed.) Less noticed — well, not noticed at all until this article, really — is that retailers recently, finally, started to exercise their right to discount selected Penguin ebooks. Given how “consumers suffered in a variety of ways from [the] scheme to eliminate retail price […]

Federal Judge Denise Cote ruled against Apple in the government’s ebook price-fixing case even faster than was expected, fulfilling her preliminary inclination expressed before the trial began. (“As the parties were informed, the Court prepared a draft opinion in advance of the bench trial based on the witness affidavits and other documents submitted with the pretrial order and the arguments of counsel in their trial memoranda.”) Judge Cote found, “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 […]