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Originally Posted by leebase
Nothing is going to change my mind due to the ruling, and I'd just be repeating all the points I and others have made all along.
2. Agency pricing is legal.
3. Publishers setting the prices instead of Amazon does not equate to "price fixing".
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These are both true. However, competitors--which publishers are--cooperating to create higher prices for consumers, is illegal. It's not the agency pricing that was criminal, but the agreement among 5 competitors and their retail outlet for the purpose of pushing higher prices on consumers.
If any one of the publishers had switched to agency pricing alone, sold books to Apple with it, and refused to sell books to Amazon without it (and probably gotten dropped from Amazon), that would not have been a crime. Had that been a successful business tactic for that publisher, enough that others decided to imitate it, that, too, would be legal.
Deciding to all change their business models at once, with the *intended, publicly-stated purpose* of getting customers to pay $13-$15 for most ebooks, instead of the $10 they were enjoying because of Amazon's discount policies, was illegal.
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You can't compare this to selling gas or milk or bread. It's just books, and no one need buy a book.
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Whether a product is a necessity or not has nothing to do with whether it's okay to break the law to sell it. Any publisher that didn't like Amazon's sales tactics had an easy solution: Stop selling through Amazon.
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4. Agency pricing brought more competition to the market, not less.
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Whether a criminal act, or the fallout from a criminal act, is overall good for the marketplace--highly debatable; there were more ebook stores in business before agency pricing then there are now--doesn't matter. It's like saying "blowing up the town hall created a booming industry in construction."
Just as a side thought, since Amazon has so many nasty business practices (not arguing with that at all), how many publishers have removed their books from Amazon as a result of this increased competition?
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5. The result of this loss by Apple and the publishers will not result in $9.99 ebooks....rather it will result in ebooks being time windowed.
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1. Irrelevant. The DoJ doesn't make its decisions based on probable market reaction.
2. Windowed ebooks quickly become bootlegged ebooks. Publishers know this; that's why they didn't just stop selling ebooks for the first few months after releasing a new bestseller.