US antitrust is primarily about consumer harm (hence the recent compensation awards) but it also offers (small) companies a venue for redress of anticompetitive behavior by other companies.
The bar is normally pretty high so there are few filings and even less successes but there is one big exception: when a company (or group) has already been found guilty of antitrust violations, the judge's findings of fact become indisputable "evidence" on which competitors claiming harm can base their claims of damages. The most recent example being the Microsoft antitrust case where the Judge ruled that MS had caused Netscape no harm but that their attempt to do so consituted an antitrust violation and thus he put them under antitrust monitoring for a decade. This was followed by dozens of private lawsuits from software companies seeking and often getting payouts, often for the results of their own bad decisions.
The bar is set high for anticompetitive antitrust cases but once it is lowered the claims multiply, which is why most targets of federal antitrust action settle with "no admision of guilt" to keep the evidence out of the public record.
In the price fix conspiracy case, the publishers settled to limit liability but since Apple refused to settle, the evidence and findings still ended up in the public record. Now comes word of the fallout: small independent ebookstores that have folded or died stillborn are suing Apple and the publishers for anticompetitive behavior, painting themselves as collateral damage of the conspirators' favoritism towards Apple.
Publishing Weekly has a (very slightly slanted) report on the lawsuits and the plaintiffs:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...st-claims.html
Quote:
In DNAML vs. Apple Inc. et al, filed in September, 2013, the upstart Australian e-book retailer alleges the company was harmed "directly and as a proximate result" of the 2010 price-fixing scheme executed by Apple and the five agency publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Penguin). Now, this month, two related cases have been accepted by Cote: one filed by Lavoho, LLC, a "successor" to the Diesel eBook Store; and another from Abbey House Media, formerly BooksonBoard.
The most recent suits offer virtually identical claims to DNAML's 2013 suit—that the 2010 agency switch destroyed the retailers' ability to compete on price. All three plaintiffs share representation, and according to a letter filed by plaintiff attorneys after a January 2014 conference, the plaintiffs expect the cases to be consolidated.
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Quote:
The suits contain nearly identical preambles detailing Apple's liability finding by Judge Cote, and they press nearly identical claims: that the illegal collusion between Apple and the publishers ended the retailers' ability to bundle, discount, promote or otherwise engage in retail price competition, thus destroying each nascent e-book business. In each complaint, the plaintiffs were said to have business models "predicated on aggressive price competition."
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PW takes a skeptical view of the suits because of the small size of the companies filing but anybody who remembers the aftermath of the Microsoft case knows that it is the smaller players that receive the most sympathetic treatment in court under antitrust enforcement. (Especially when the judge is annoyed.) And that once the small players win, the bigger ones pile on.
And in this case, if the small Adept-based ebookstores can make a case that gheh were harmed by the conspiracy to reduce competition in the BPH ebook market, then so can Adobe, Sony, and Google. And, because the Agency pricing of ebooks enabled Nook and Kindle to sell eink readers at or below cost, so can hardware-only reader vendors like Pocketbook, Bookeen, Aztak, etc. (Essentially anybody that signed up to sell generic Adept ebooks and hardware has at least a ghost of a chance.)
Once the rulings start piling up, the lawsuits start snowballing.
Just ask Microsoft; they ended up paying out billions.
Apple really should have settled.