Quote:
Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
Negotiations which were nefarious at best, and illegal after all as shown in court.
ETA: You are absolutely right, Amazon turned out to be the real winner of it. In hindsight they might even have planned for something like this to happen by aggravating the publishers enough to drive them to consider collusion.
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It came out a year after the initial trial that Amazon lawyers wrote the initial DOJ brief. At the time, Amazon had something along the lines of 90% of the ebook market.
The music industry did exactly the same thing with Amazon when they were trying to break the iTunes hold on digital music, i.e. they all got together and agreed to let Amazon sell music DRM free, while refusing to let Apple do the same for well over a year. The idea that it's legal if Amazon does it, but illegal if it's done to Amazon is a logically inconsistent position. So it's pretty straight forward why Apple would think that what they did was completely above board.a
IMPO, there is a lot of results oriented arguing going on. We like DRM free music so it was perfectly fine then. We like cheap ebooks, so anything that gets in the way of that is bad. The fact that Amazon was perfectly fine with agency pricing once they got Apple out of the way and Cote's order expired, which is why we now have agency pricing, seems to be ignored.