[Ninjalawyer]

Originally Posted by stonetools

My point is that there are legal issues arising from this case and sound defense arguments available that go beyond whether collusion occurred. How people missed that after reading that article I cannot fathom, actually. An anti-trust expert quoted made it very clear that collusion was one of the
three major points of law at issue in this case. What could be clearer than that?

Indeed I have quoted from Supreme Court Justice Kennedy in an antitrust case stating that if supplier fixes a higher than market price , its legally permissible in certain cases .The SCOTUS has not held in that it could happen in case involving multiple suppliers, but they certainly could, if you review the arguments that the Supreme Court accepted.

To quote a certain entity,
" This conversation can serve no purpose any longer. Goodbye."

To spend one more post beating my head against a wall: You're misreading your own link. Knebel, who is quoted in the Wired article, stated that there are three major points of law at stake, one of which Whether Apple and publishers engaged collusion. However, the three points of law that Knebel notes are related but separate; in other words, collusion is still illegal if its proved, even if the other legal matters are resolved in the publishers' and Apple's favour.

For those playing along at home, here are a few choice quotes:

Knebel says there are three major points of law at stake in both the class-action suit and the Justice Department investigation against Apple and the five publishers:

Whether and how the agency model applies to virtual goods;
Whether Apple and publishers engaged in a “hub-and-spoke” conspiracy or simply “conscious parallelism”;
The status of the “most-favored nation” clause, common to many legal contracts today, which Apple used to ensure that books could not be sold elsewhere at a lower price than in the iBooks store.

And a little later in the article:

Even if agency pricing for virtual goods is perfectly legal and acceptable, publishers colluding to more or less simultaneously switch to agency pricing is not. Publishers almost certainly did not meet together in a room to deliberate about how to use Apple to screw over Amazon, or even how to all switch to agency pricing. They probably didn’t exchange e-mails or phone calls or communicate with one another in any way. If they did, the case for collusion would be much simpler.

And the case you keep harping about, having actually read it, I can tell you it doesn't stand for what you're hoping it does. Having declared myself a doctor, I'm way too busy with my medical practice to keep up with this.

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Is the Supreme Court involved at this point? Man, how did I miss that?

Don't feel bad about that; it's only natural that the an eminent legal scholar such as Stonetools would be more on top of these things than the rest of us. Since declaring myself a doctor, I'm now way too busy with my medical practice to keep up with this stuff.