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Originally Posted by ilovejedd
Don't see why Amazon is included in the lawsuit when they were against agency pricing in the first place. It just so happened they couldn't do anything but comply with the publishers' edict.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
That is Amazon's public position and likely would be their in-court position, but the case can be made that the price fix benefits them by increasing their BPH content margins, allowing them (as well as Kobo and B&N) to prosper by applying that added revenue to expand in other areas. There's no telling how compelling such a case might be in court, but it *can* be made and, as I pointed out above, in today's anti-business, class-warfare populist climate every succesful company is guilty until proven innocent and often not even then.
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I'm inclined to believe that it's more about discovery of needed evidence. Yes, the case can be made that the gains they stood to make from the arrangement caused them to go in with the Agency 6 on the scheme, but they have at least one attempted stand-off on their side. (Was in MacMillan? I don't remember right this second.) In addition, Amazon worked with Overdrive to bring library books to Kindle users. While this doesn't apply directly to the case, it DOES add another level of separation between Amazon's intent and the will of the publishers, giving Amazon a boost in perception in the populist climate.
There is a distinction between being in cahoots with price fixing, and making decisions in the best interest of a company. All it would take is evidence of threats of, or even allusions to, publishers pulling their content from Amazon to paint Amazon as a company under duress to comply for the sake of remaining competitive, rather than a company in collusion with the publishers.
Any case that Amazon was complicit would almost have to hinge on the fact that Amazon is so huge that its actions made it possible for the scheme to succeed, and that gains made my doing so were greater than losses that would have occurred otherwise.
Now, if the discovery process brings to light evidence that Amazon was an active or even cooperating party to the collusion, all of this goes out the window.