Quote:
Originally Posted by emellaich
Back to the original post, I'm interested in any lawyers thoughts on this entire "Agency Model" approach. It seems to me that it is just another version of price fixing. I think that years ago, the famous case of price fixing was about refineries trying to set prices fro gas stations. How is this different?
|
It's different from the gas stations because the refiners were trying to set prices at both their owned and the independent stations. They could set them at the company owned but not the independents.
Agency is not price fixing. Price fixing would be if Macmillan and Hachette and Random House sat together and devised a firm set or prices for all ebooks. With the U.S. Supreme Court configured as it is (thank you, Junior -- said with dripping sarcasm) I suspect that each ebook would be considered a separate product, which would make price fixing impossible to prove. More importantly, the Bush Court has already ruled that manufacturer's are entitled to set minimum resale prices. You see this everyday with the lack of discounting that occurs, for example, with Sony Readers and TVs. Sony has always been a big fan of minimum resale pricing. It would be very easy to fit the ebook pricing into that rationale.