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Originally Posted by pwalker8
My understanding of the situation is that the publishers didn't get together as set a price, but rather they got together and forced Amazon to accept an agent pricing agreement, where the publishers set the price, not Amazon. Whether or not that is an anti-trust situation isn't really known.
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My understanding of the situation is that
A) The publishers thought they could raise ebook prices (by preventing epub discounting) so there would be less pricing pressure on their big profit maker, the hardcover book, if they could switch to ebook agent pricing agreements.
B) None of the publishers thought they alone could get Amazon to accept an agent pricing agreement, but if they all insisted on switching, Amazon would go along with it.
C) Apple didn't want to get into the ebook business if they thought Amazon could undercut them, but they really wanted to get into the ebook business so they were in favor of the agent pricing agreements.
D) Apple was involved in discussions with the publishers which allowed the publishers to know which other publishers were going to force Amazon to switch.
E) Even though they all professed innocence, the publishers all settled rather than go to court.
F) When Apple lost in court, the judge wrote a detailed decision in such a way that it is unlikely that Apple will get the decision reversed.
You can claim it's unknown all you want, but I expect when all the appeals are over and done with, Apple will not prevail.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
So she did think that Apple was guilty, and thought the trial would confirm her preconception. Not surprisingly, it did.
My personal view of the litigation is that to have the government give a publisher a legal monopoly, which is precisely what copyright is, and then go after them for being a monopolist, is absurd.
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The difference between this and a trial before an impartial jury is that when Cote made that statement, she had already overseen the settlements between the DOJ and the publishers and seen most of the discovery evidence. What she hadn't seen is the Apple testimonies within the trial. One of the DOJ lawyers asked if she would be able to share any of her thoughts on the case so far during the pretrial hearings and she gave them.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Reuters
Cote then gave what she called her "tentative view," which she said was based largely on material submitted as evidence - emails and correspondence that took place over a six-week period between December 2009 and January 2010.
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And Steve, the government wasn't going after the publishers for being monopolists, they were going after them for colluding in an attempt to raise prices.
For what it's worth, with all the discounting going on at the non-Amazon retailer I mostly bought from, the price I paid for ebooks before April 1 2010 was about 1/3rd the price I would have paid for the same books a year later. And since the settlements, I've been able to find deals like I was getting before agency pricing went into effect (and at least half of them not at Amazon).
Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
But as I see it, the whole idea of copyright it to make the book expensive so that creators (not just the author, but the whole team who created the book) get incentivized to do the best job possible. The guilty publishers were just doing, in the US, what they are legally required to do in other countries, and I don't see why our way is better for society.
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The purpose of copyright is to ensure that the author gets paid, the publisher creates a contract with exclusive rights from the copyright holder to ensure that their costs involved in creating the book are recouped. Book publishing is a somewhat elastic market, and making a book more expensive is not necessarily adequate or the right thing to do to recoup those costs. The book price fixing in France, for example, is for the protection of small (local) bookstores, not for the publisher.