Legal

The tangled web of what the Department of Justice, the states, and the class-action plaintiffs now want from Apple was plainly evident at Friday afternoon’s court hearing, in which Judge Cote heard a number of thorny and complicated issues. Except for a swift dismissal of Apple’s conditional request to stay proceedings (she of course “didn’t believe Apple is likely to succeed on appeal”), Cote deferred the biggest decisions for later in the month. She did not decide on the DOJ’s proposed injunctive relief, contentiously and vociferously objected to by Apple and book publishers, and she did not commit to a trial […]

The court docket filled with new filings Thursday afternoon in advance of Judge Denise Cote’s Friday afternoon conference regarding proposals for an injunction against Apple. To the Publishers DOJ attorney Lawrence Buterman predictably but egregiously replied to the settling publishers’ complaint that the proposed injunction reneges on their long-negotiated, court-approved settlement. First he argues that Justice’s proposal “in no way seeks to modify” those settlements “or punish publisher defendants.” The injunction is all about Apple and “imposes no obligation” on publishers. Because Apple went to trial and was found guilty rather than settling, Buterman reasons, they have to get a […]

Attorneys for all of the settling publishers (Harper, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House and Macmillan) jointly filed objections to the DOJ’s proposed injunction against Apple on Wednesday: “Under the guise of punishing Apple, they effectively punish the settling defendants by prohibiting agreements with Apple using an agency model.” (For the record, they filed together “solely for the convenience of the Court and in the interests of judicial economy.”) The fundamental arguments — and even some of the quotes cited — will be familiar to readers who remember our Monday post, About Last Week. The filing notes that Justice’s […]

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 […]