A federal court in Chicago dismissed a lawsuit filed against Barnes & Noble in October 2012 over the skimming of customer PIN codes from credit-card readers at stores in New York, California and seven other states, Bloomberg reports. The original suit, filed by Chicago customer Elizabeth Nowak and later consolidated with three other complaints for class-action seeking status, alleged that BN, by failing to disclose the PIN pad scam to customers for six weeks, was in “breach of an implied contract to protect that information and violation of Illinois consumer fraud laws” and that the company’s “security failures enabled the […]
Legal
Briefs: Bloomsbury Buys Legal Publisher; Consumer Settlement Payout Rises
Bloomsbury has acquired Oxford-based legal publisher Hart Publishing for £6.5 million in cash. The company says the unit is expected to “be immediately earnings enhancing.” The purchase is the latest step in their standing promise to boost academic and professional revenues to 50 percent of company sales within 5 years. It also nearly exhausts their cash resources for acquisitions. As of June 30, the company reported cash reserves of £8.5 million. The estimated per-book payouts to ebook consumers as a result of the legal settlements has been increased. Amazon has received attention for an informational post on their forums and email […]
Briefs: Amazon Appeals to Supreme Court, Adds Kindle Mexico; and More
On August 23, Amazon filed a brief with the US Supreme Court, asking it to hear their challenge to New York’s 2008 law requiring the etailer to collect sales tax in the state due to their network of online affiliates (Amazon Associates). The New York Court of Appeals upheld the law in a ruling in March 2013. The company hired former Solicitor General Ted Olson, now at the Washington, DC office of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, who filed the petition, to represent them in the matter. (Irony alert: Apple’s lead law firm in the ebook pricing cases is the New […]
Judge Rejects iOS Free Ride for Apple’s eBook Competitors w
Judge Denise Cote handed Apple some modest victories in the Tuesday afternoon hearing about her forthcoming injunction, which she expects to formalize next week. The judge said it was “unnecessary” to force Apple to let ebook competitors restore in-app purchasing without giving Apple a commission — probably the most significant outstanding item for the ebook landscape. Apple seems to have won permission in principle to ask publishers to “modify” their current contracts rather than start over again with new agreements (but that does not mean that publishers will agree to do so, or have any obligation to go along with […]
Apple Concedes to New Terms with Publishers, Resists eBook App Changes
The Federal Court docket now includes two separate filings from Apple’s attorney on Friday, presenting the company’s revised approach to the proposed injunction. Apple is walking a line between Judge Denise Cote’s guilty verdict and the company’s belief that they are innocent and their hopes to prevail on appeal. Nonetheless, Apple attorney Orin Snyder insisted in his letter to Judge Cote on Friday that the company “has attempted in good faith to listen carefully to the court’s concerns and address those concerns in a forthright manner, even while it pursues what it believes to be strong arguments on appeal.” Our […]
People, Etc.
Based on two anonymous sources, Shane Salerno’s forthcoming movie about the late J.D. Salinger and the tie-in book SALINGER co-written by Salerno and David Shields asserts that the late author instructed his estate to publish at least five posthumous books, “authorizing a specific timetable” for publication running from 2015 through 2020. The NYT says the books are described as including “a novel set during World War II and based on his first marriage to Sylvia Welter, and a novella modeled on his own war experiences.” A story collection called THE FAMILY GLASS would expand previously published stories about the Glass […]