Legal

Sitting in court — and reporting on what transpires there — is a curious and incomplete experience. Witnesses do not recount a complete narrative for the court that is then subject to further probing. Rather, the live exchanges are a detailed follow-up to written “exhibits.” So most of the questioning is driven by documents the witnesses are asked to review, only portions of which are shown on screens not even visible from the press gallery. The government has been posting many of their exhibits on their web site. The defense, to the best of our knowledge and searching, has not […]

Moments of color in Judge Denise Cote’s courtroom on Thursday included defense attorney Howard Heiss explaining “Jedi mind tricks” (“a technique used by the Jedis to persuade others to do things…by powers of suggestion”); and aggressive questioning of Google executive Tom Turvey by lead defense attorney Orin Snyder that confirmed Turvey doesn’t have an iPad and had him disagreeing with the statement that “Google is a powerful company in the media and entertainment space.” We learned that people within Google call their ebookstore “Play Books,” and saw another attorney bark at Amazon’s Russ Grandinetti for looking at his lawyer too […]

Wednesday’s ebook pricing trial against Apple finished with testimony from Amazon executive Russ Grandinetti, who will return to the stand on Thursday, with colleagues Laura Porco and David Naggar to follow. He said that during the original switch to agency, “it was our belief the reason we were in this position is that some of the publishers wanted to slow down the success of Kindle.” Grandinetti agreed with Apple attorney Howard Heiss’s characterization of the original meeting in Seattle at the end of January, 2010 with Macmillan executives John Sargent and Brian Napack to first discuss new contract models as tense, and […]

Just before lunch on Day 2 of the Department of Justice’s trial against Apple, Penguin ceo David Shanks took the stand to explain his version of how the publisher’s agency model agreement with Apple came into being. Unlike the clipped, succinct testimony of Apple general counsel Kevin Saul, who finished his stint in the witness box earlier in the morning, Shanks’ manner was more expansive, even when it appeared to raise some eyebrows in the eyes of the court. At the close of the day’s testimony, Shanks’ spoke volumes when his explanation of the economic nuances of the agency model […]

Tuesday morning’s testimony at the Apple ebook price fixing trial focused on Apple’s counsel Kevin Saul, with a curiously charged exchange over emails from early March 2010 — after the alleged collusion with the Agency Five was complete. In the correspondence Wiley’s Deirdre Silver is resisting Apple’s most favored nations clause, as she notes “we cannot control pricing by third parties to whom we sell eBooks on a ‘wholesale’ basis.” Silver is describing what came to be the crux of what we dubbed the “hybrid model” — which is how nearly all publishers wound up doing business with Apple. In […]

Lead Apple defense attorney Orin Snyder underscored Apple’s contention that the whole case is “bizarre” in his opening arguments on Monday saying, “What the government wants to do is reverse engineer a conspiracy from a market effect.”  Snyder was quick to express “concern” over presiding Judge Denise Cote’s previous expression of her “tentative view” that Apple would be proven guilty in a pre-trial conference. “All we want is a fair trial,” Snyder said. “Every defendant should be presumed to have done nothing wrong.” Judge Cote insisted in reply, “This is not a vote on whether I like Apple, it’s whether or […]