Apple Fires Back at the Feds, Amazon

[onehandle]

Source: Wall Street Journal

Nearly two days after the Department of Justice filed antitrust charges against Apple and major book publishers, Apple is responding. Here’s comment from Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr:

The DOJ’s accusation of collusion against Apple is simply not true. The launch of the iBookstore in 2010 fostered innovation and competition, breaking Amazon’s monopolistic grip on the publishing industry. Since then customers have benefited from eBooks that are more interactive and engaging. Just as we’ve allowed developers to set prices on the App Store, publishers set prices on the iBookstore.

Apple’s response is similar to ones made by Penguin Group and MacMillan, two of the five publishers named in the suit. The three other publishers — HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster — signed settlements with the DOJ immediately after the suit was filed Wednesday morning. (News Corp., which owns HarperCollins, also owns this Web site.)

It’s worth noting that Apple’s pricing policy with books and apps differs from the setup it has with the music industry. In that relationship, Apple pays the music labels a wholesale price for their digital assets, and then sets the retail price itself.

Read more: http://allthingsd.com/20120412/apple-fires-back-at-the-feds-amazon

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DOJ is likely to lose e-book antitrust suit targeting Apple

The U.S. Justice Department's legal pursuit of Apple for alleged e-book price fixing stretches the boundaries of antitrust law and is likely to end in defeat.

That's what happened in 1982, when an embarrassed Justice Department admitted its antitrust lawsuit against IBM was "without merit" and abandoned the case. And in 2001, a federal appeals court nixed the Justice Department's ambitious attempt to rewrite antitrust law by carving Microsoft into two separate companies.

"It's a harder case against Apple than the publishers," says Geoffrey Manne, who teaches antitrust law at the Lewis and Clark Law School in Oregon and runs the International Center for Law and Economics. (See CNET's list of related articles and an explanation of e-book economics.)

One reason lies in the Justice Department's 36-page complaint, which recounts how publishers met over breakfast in a London hotel and dinners at Manhattan's posh Picholine restaurant, which boasts a "Best of Award of Excellence" from Wine Spectator magazine. The key point is that Apple wasn't present.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57412861-38/doj-is-likely-to-lose-e-book-antitrust-suit-targeting-apple

[Ruby the Liberal]

1. Boys and girls, that is how it is done.

Find the MSM piece to lead it all off and then add analysis that supplements.

Well done, onehandle

[onehandle]

4. I couldn't have done it without your nifty lock.

Well, I suppose I could have, but I was being lazy.

[Snake Alchemist]

2. There was just an OP today about how Amazon is going to monopolize e-books and they were excoriated.

It will be interesting to gauge the reaction here.

[magic59]

3. Apple is a hungry monster

even bigger then the military industrial complex. I was surprise the gov dared to challenge them about anything. Apple is all about massive profits at any cost. Just ask their slave labor in China.

[onehandle]

5. Same slave labor makes whatever you posted that on.

They all use the same suppliers and fabrication plants.

[Pholus]

10. The cult of Apple just makes it more obscenely profitable for some though...

But thanks for agreeing that under the hood Apples are actually no better.

[sudopod]

6. Having 100 billion dollars on hand

it is worth 1/7 of the annual budget military-industrial complex.

Still, nothing to shake an iStick at.

[harmonicon]

7. Give me a fucking break.

I can't repeat the same points every damn time.... get a clue!! Slave labour? No. If you don't want international trade, please go live a life somewhere that doesn't engage with China/one-sixth the earth's population.

[htuttle]

8. Factory conditions in China are like they were in the US 100 years ago...

...though magnified in that horribly gigantic way that China is so good at.

There was one force that improved working conditions in the US, and that was unions. No corporation anywhere is going to just give up something to the workers to be nice to them. That's not how modern corporations work, and that's not what Chicago School executives and managers are taught to do. You have to make them give it up.

As the union movement has weakened here since 1980, we've been headed right back in that direction, too.

[Viva]

9. Ebooks were a loss leader for Amazon

Amazon was charging less than cost for eBooks in order to sell their Kindle. Apple came in and coerced publishers to lower their prices for a guaranteed 30% of profits. Publishers were getting paid more, often, by selling to Amazon. I never understood this crazy fight. The amount of money saved by not printing a hard copy is minuscule. Most of the costs of publishing is the machine that creates the book, from publicists to authors, fact checkers to editors. When a book is published by an organization that scrimps on this stuff, it is apparent. It is not just a author and a reader. Someone reads all those submissions so that you don't have to.

Every business owner has the option to loose money by selling below cost. It is not the most effective way to run a business, however. Publishers should be selling to all book dealers at the same price. They have many ways of giving "special" pricing to "special" customers. If this lawsuit was to fix that problem, it would correct some real unfair trade practices.