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Originally Posted by stonetools
The DOJ has been investigating the agency pricing agreement for some time. The reason why they haven't taken legal action, IMO? Because they realize that undoing agency would hand the ebook retail market to Amazon on a silver platter. They would be creating more work for themselves ( future action vs Amazon) if they just undid the agency model.
I'm thinking that they may end up leaving agency in place, but remove any terms favorable to Apple. Whatever the DOJ does , it's going to take Into the account the publisher's stated goal of preserving a diversity of ebook retailers.
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It's funny actually, because the music industry effectively handed iTunes the lion's share of MP3 sales by insisting on DRM - iTunes was the first to develop a decent market and was able to lock people in to its technology with the DRM record companies insisted on. Then, when iTunes wielded more power than the record companies because of the practice, they told the record companies they would be selling DRM free tracks.
The publishing industry didn't learn this lesson and used DRM to help Amazon secure a position similar to that of Apple. Then, when the publishers finally woke up, they realized that they'd created a monster and may have broken the law in trying to regain some of their control.