The European Commission formally accepted Penguin’s December 2012 settlement on ebook pricing, which essentially follows the Department of Justice settlement conditions and mirrors the “commitments” already made in Europe by the other four settling publishers and Apple. The Commission said in a statement that “after a market test” it “is satisfied that the commitments offered by Penguin remedy the competition concerns it had identified.” (Our standard reminder: The European settlement only affects countries that allow the discounting of ebooks in the first place — so it applies principally to the UK.) Separately, with the final state settlements with Penguin and […]
Legal
Penguin Has New eBook Pricing, and Random House Should Follow Shortly
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 […]
Vanity Fair On The Harper Lee Lawsuit
Harper Lee’s lawsuit against her former agent Sam Pinkus filed in May merits a lengthy feature by Mark Seal in the August issue of Vanity Fair (the magazine published a brief excerpt online earlier this week and provided us with a PDF copy of the entire piece.) While Seal quotes liberally from Lee’s original complaint, and also draws on Charles Shields’ unauthorized biography of Lee for some of the publishing background, he also paints a fuller portrait of the author, now 87 and living in an assisted living facility in Monroeville, Alabama. Though a friend said she is “paralyzed on […]
Even Faster Than Expected, Judge Finds Apple Guilty of Conspiracy to Raise eBook Prices
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 […]
Legal: Penguin Drops Several Author Lawsuits; McIntosh & Otis Sues Pinkus
As noted last fall, Penguin filed multiple lawsuits to recover advances from over a dozen authors whom the publisher says never delivered their manuscripts. With the merger with Random House completed last week, we wondered about the status of these lawsuits and discovered Penguin dropped more than half the complaints “with prejudice” – meaning each side was responsible for any legal fees incurred. (When reached for comment a Penguin spokesperson said “As was Penguin’s desire, many of the lawsuits have been settled amicably.”) New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead was sued for $20,000 over a 2003 deal to collect her […]
Appeals Court Vacates Class Certification in Google Books Lawsuit Until Fair Use Issues Are Resolved
In a brief five-page ruling, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals vacated Judge Denny Chin’s June 2012 certification of the Authors Guild as a class in the long-running Google Books lawsuit, which itself was a repeat of the original 2005 class certification. The appeals court concluded that class certification “was premature in the absence of a determination by the District Court of the merits of Google’s ‘fair use’ defense.” They also opined that “Google’s claim that plaintiffs are not representative of the certified class” is “an argument which, in our view, may carry some force.” So the actual issues of […]