BTW, all those comments harping about how "special" publishing is?
Here's a short-n-sweet tutorial on how other "special" industries fared in antitrust court:
http://www.courtneymilan.com/ramblin...ust-snowflake/
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Stop thinking about this emotionally. Stop thinking of this as your livelihood. Ask yourself honestly: Do you think that courts will say that book publishing is more important than the building of safe bridges? Do you really think that courts will find it so much more important that they will grant book publishers a judicial exemption in the face of more than a hundred years denying them?
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One particularly interesting court opinion:
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In United States v. Socony-Vacuum Oil Co., 310 U.S. 150 (1940), the defendants—like the agency publishers at issue here—thought that they were facing what they called “ruinous competition”—competition so fierce that it (they claimed) could destroy the industry. For that reason, they believed that their price-fixing scheme should be allowed.
Here’s what the Court thought of that:
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Congress has not left with us the determination of whether or not particular price-fixing schemes are wise or unwise, healthy or destructive. It has not permitted the age-old cry of ruinous competition and competitive evils to be a defense to price-fixing conspiracies. It has no more allowed genuine or fancied competitive abuses as a legal justification for such schemes than it has the good intentions of the members of the combination. If such a shift is to be made, it must be done by the Congress.
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Anybody still doubt the outcome of the court?
At this point, all that matters is that Five Publishers coordinated through a sixth player to *simultaneously* raise consumer prices. (Three accepted they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar and settled or a mild wrist-slap.)
Unless the DOJ fabricated their email evidence (seriously?) there really isn't much *fact* to debate here.
Just emotion.
Time to get past denial.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BC...s_model#Stages