Legal

As a follow-up to our Monday story wondering when the Department of Justice will publish the public comments on the proposed ebook pricing settlement, along with their replies, the Antitrust Division’s Mark Ryan wrote to Judge Cote yesterday in answer to Bob Kohn’s complaint. Notably, Ryan says DOJ received over 800 comments, “as many as half” of which “arrived within a few days of or after the comment deadline.” Ryan tells the Judge the department is “working expeditiously” to publish the comments and their replies, and without giving a firm deadline indicates they intend to do so “approximately two weeks” […]

June 25 was technically the deadline not only for public comments on the Department of Justice’s proposed settlement with Hachette, Harper, and Simon & Schuster, but also for Justice’s publication of those comments along with their replies. But as of Tuesday morning, more than two weeks after the deadline, there was no sign of any of these comments on the DOJ’s website. Even though the government now has one extra week–until August 3–to file its motion for entry of a proposed final judgment on the settlement, the opportunity for Judge Denise Cote to evaluate that voluminous number of comments shrinks […]

Earlier this week when we reported on the June 3, 2013 bench trial date scheduled by Judge Denise Cote for the DOJ’s ebook price fixing suit against Apple, Macmillan, and Penguin, we weren’t sure of the exact schedule she had in mind. It took a while to appear on the docket but we now know the court’s official scheduling order. All parties, including the DOJ, State attorneys general, and the three defendants, must submit an amended Joint Official Report taking into account the June 22 rulings by July 6. They must then contact Judge Kimba Wood about scheduling settlement discussions […]