Legal

Penguin asked for–and now has received–permission to shar ein the open court docket the previously “confidential” pre-agency pricing data they referred to in opposing the approval of the federal settlement. Even now that the settlement has been finalized, “Penguin believes it is in the public interest to make evidence like this public,” they told Judge Cote. “Exhibit A, compiled using historical pricing information from Amazon, shows that (1) the average Amazon price, on a title by title basis, for the majority of Penguin new release eBook titles was higher than $9.99 prior to the agency model.” The data comprises the […]

Sometimes the judge holds all the cards that matter. Bob Kohn’s attempt to obtain an emergency stay of the enactment of the Department of Justice’s ebook pricing settlement pending appeal before all three Apple contracts were voided and the landscape reset itself appears to have been stymied by Judge Denise Cote, who has effectively run out the clock on Kohn by inaction. While Judge Cote denied Kohn’s request for a stay earlier this week, she didn’t rule one way or the other on whether to grant him standing to appeal the ruling in the first place, stretching that process out […]

Judge Denise Cote acknowledged Bob Kohn’s requests to appeal and stay her judgment in the ebook pricing settlement in a brief notice issued Monday. The motion to stay was denied. Anticipating that, as we reported yesterday Kohn had already gone to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals with his request. Though Kohn was initially trying to forestall the first stage of the settlement’s decree–voiding Apple’s ebook contracts within a week–Judge Cote has set deadlines for next week on his motion to appeal, at which point the entire contractual landscape for the Settlers may have changed. Opposition to Kohn’s motion is […]

With no response yet from District Court Judge Denise Cote to his Friday motions seeking permission to both stay and appeal the ebook settlement, entrepreneur and attorney Bob Kohn filed an emergency request with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday morning. He asked the Appeals Court “to consider and rule upon” his motion for a stay by this Friday. Reasserting many of the arguments made last week to Judge Cote, Kohn posits that “without a stay of execution of the final judgment, an appeal becomes moot and the consequent harm to the public becomes irreparable.” To meet the […]