Posted on 03/07/2016 8:00:43 AM PST by Swordmaker
“The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from Apple Inc. and left in place a ruling that the company conspired with publishers to raise electronic book prices when it sought to challenge Amazon.com’s dominance of the market,” The Associated Press reports.
“The justices’ order on Monday lets stand an appeals court ruling that found Cupertino, California-based Apple violated antitrust laws in 2010,” AP reports. “The 2-1 ruling by the New York-based appeals court sustained a trial judge’s finding that Apple orchestrated an illegal conspiracy to raise prices. A dissenting judge called Apple’s actions legal, ‘gloves-off competition.'”
“Apple Inc. must pay $450 million to end an antitrust suit after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to question a finding that the company orchestrated a scheme to raise the prices for electronic books,” Greg Stohr reports for Bloomberg. “The accord calls for Apple to pay $400 million to e-book consumers, $20 million to the states, and $30 million in legal fees.”
“At the Supreme Court, Apple argued that its actions enhanced competition by providing consumers with a new e-book platform. The company said overall e-book prices have fallen in the years since the introduction of iBookstore [sic],” Stohr reports. “‘Following Apple’s entry, output increased, overall prices decreased, and a major new retailer began to compete in a market formerly dominated by a single firm,’ the company said in its appeal.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Travesty. Justice was not served in this case.
Based on your tirade, I must have really hit the nail on the head. You’ve done a good job of cementing my opinion that you’re compensating for your real world inadequacies with a poorly constructed online fantasy world.
Still can't address the topic? TROLL.
Every word I wrote is absolutely true. . . particularly my assessment of your purpose and lack of real participation in this thread and several other Apple related threads in which you've purposefully invaded today just to insult and denigrate me, which definately qualifies you for earning the title of "asshat." That epithet is also a true description of you. Frankly, I think you suffer from severe projection syndrome.
Scutter has outclassed you here and now on this thread. This is what I have to say as an impartial observer
Scutter is not an invader, just a FR commentator. There are no fenced off threads here that are for Apple fanboys only. My neutral but engaged opinion. And how about that Tim Cook conspiring with Karl Rove against Donald Trump? Hardly neutral in my book! Other corporations would be boycotted by NYC style liberals for such hi-jinx.
“Aren’t you the one who just commented about the Defense of Marriage Act? “
No. I commented about Judge Jacobs.
“The constitution is not a living thing, but the law itself does evolve and has to, because society, business, technology, and human interaction CHANGES in response to all of that. . . and the law has to recognize those changes. “
Interesting that you say that it matters not what the law says but how judges interpret the laws based on societal changes ....
” The constitution is not a living thing, The constitution is not a living thing, but the law itself does evolve and has to, because society, business, technology, and human interaction CHANGES in response to all of that. . . and the law has to recognize those changes. “
How many amendments does our Constitution have?
“If not, can you point me to the Bill passed by either house of the Congress and signed by the President of the United States legalizing Same-Sex-Marriage??? Please provide the Public Law number and year it was passed. I REALLY want to read it. “
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
I really don’t care about the thread topic. What I do care about is the abusive, often profane, posts you make anytime someone disagrees with you. This is not the behavior of a mature, emotionally balanced indvidual. It stifles discussion, and drives people away.
Exactly. dennisw.
SwordMaker wants to make his pro-Apple pronouncements and expects them to be swallowed without question. If anyone objects, or even tries to have a friendly debate on the topic, he flies into a fit of rage and starts making abusive posts.
Thnk about this. Every single post from this guy is pro-Apple. When does someone ever agree with every single thing a corporation does? At the minimum it indcates someone who is strongly biased in his opinins. At the worst, it indicates someone who has some vested interest in promoting the company. Either way, you have someone whose posts one should be strongly skeptical of, if not outright dismissed.
Sword fancies himself as the authority on everything Apple and perhaps he come close to this but he is not the authority on Apple vs its competitors. He is too blinded by his fanboyism which you have experienced in major torrents and lots worse than I ever have. Partly due to Sword I will not buy anything Apple but Tim Cooks gay propagandizing also figures in.
His worst line is that liberal judges interpret the law instead of following the law yet in defense of Apple he relies on interpretations of the law instead of the actual words of the law.
This post is not meant as a pro-Apple (or any other company) post. I am serious in my question, as I have read all I can find and still don’t understand the ruling:
I understand Apple had a pretty ugly contract/agreement they expected publishers to sign (particularly independent publishers/individuals) if their material was to be carried by iBooks.
BUT - I’m trying to figure out how antitrust plays in - Apple didn’t force anyone to sign up with them. They laid pricing guidelines (as many other companies do in many differing categories of products) as part of the “deal” if you wanted to sell through them. 100% of those publishers had the right to not choose Apple’s iBooks format -
Further, as Apple said in their defense, eBook prices have fallen since Apple joined the fray, with or without the agreement/use policy in place. I don’t see how consumers were harmed (indeed, they benefit with competition).
IN other words - my question is: What, exactly did Apple do wrong (legally)? How did they harm consumers? Indeed, WHO was harmed- particularly to the tune of $450million?
Sword fancies himself as the authority on everything Apple and perhaps he come close to this but he is not the authority on Apple vs its competitors. He is too blinded by his fanboyism which you have experienced in major torrents and lots worse than I ever have. Partly due to Sword I will not buy anything Apple but Tim Cooks gay propagandizing also figures in.Yes, and he's demonstrated time and again that he'll misrepresent the facts in order to try and bully others into his viewpoint. For example, a little while back I was discussing with him the bad-PIN lockout feature, and Apple's ability or inability to disable it on one particular phone. Now I am relatively familiar with this space, as it directly intersects my work, and I know that Apple has released very little detail about the A9 chip. What is out there is largely speculation from industry pundits. So immediately I was suspicious of his bold, absolute statements about how the algorithm was implemented in silicon.
I also know, being someone that does chip design, that it is very unlikely that an engineer would hard-code into the silicon the number of PIN attempts that were allowed. It's just the kind of thing that someone is likely going to want to change, even the sort of thing an enterprise organization will want to set as a policy for all their users. If it's hard coded in the chip design (as opposed to a programmable, settable thing), you are stuck with it forever on that generation of the device. What you WILL put in the silicon are the sorts of things necessary to bootstrap a secure code environment (i.e., equivalent of the TPM chip used by some PCs) and to perform encryption securely and with minimal overhead. If you have a good secure code facility, which Apple does, then this gives the Apple software developers the ability to make arbitrary changes to the code, in a secure way, i.e. someone outside of Apple will find it difficult or impossible to make their code masquerade as code from Apple.
So when he stated that it was impossible for Apple to do what was requested of them (despite the fact that they indirectly admitted that it was not, btw), my concerns about his honesty were, unfortunately, confirmed. I then started looking into his past and current posts on other threads, and what I found was a pattern of shouting, insulting, and cursing at others. I think people who behave that way need to have that behavior called out until they either stop or go away. Too many of that sort on a forum, and it becomes an unpleasant place to visit.
Just my opinion, worth what you paid for it :) I'm sure he'll be along shortly to call me an idiot or worse. Hopefully anyone who reads this, or my future posts on his threads, will at least take a "trust but verify" stance with any and all SwordMaker posts.
His worst line is that liberal judges interpret the law instead of following the law yet in defense of Apple he relies on interpretations of the law instead of the actual words of the law.He's been right about a good number of things, but I just don't trust anything he says anymore without independent verification. I've seen far too much spin, sometimes outright lies, from the guy.
“IN other words - my question is: What, exactly did Apple do wrong (legally)?
First sentence of the Sherman Act. 15 U.S. Code P1
“Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.”
How did they harm consumers?
Totally irrelevant but since you ask, ebook prices jumped up 30 to 50% immediately upon implementation of the contracts.
” Apple didn’t force anyone to sign up with them. “
No, but Apple conspired with them fix prices higher than the present market.
“They laid pricing guidelines (as many other companies do in many differing categories of products) as part of the “deal” if you wanted to sell through them. 100% of those publishers had the right to not choose Apple’s iBooks format “
You are missing the point. Apple conspired with the publishers to set pricing guidelines for the publishers, NOT just what Apple would pay for the books.
The publishers conspired amongst each other to fix prices and Apple was a part of that conspiracy.
YOU? "An impartial observer"? Baron Dennis Von Munchausen, the thread troll extraordinaire? You are not an impartial observer and no one who has visited any Apple thread would ever come to that conclusion. I am not "outclassed" by someone whose sole purpose to drop into a thread is to throw classless insults merely because I truthfully answered them, and called him on his rude, juvenile behavior."
His entire purpose is disruption of the discussion in the thread, a typical anti-Apple Hate brigade tactic. He offered nothing constructive. That is not "outclassing" anyone or anything. It is drive-by graffiti posting. The thread and FR would be better off without such personal attack posts.
That's not responsive to the question or the reality in which we find ourselves. It is becoming obvious the problem here is you live in a fantasyland of "what ought to be" rather than what is.
“That’s not responsive to the question “
It absolutely is! You asked me to cite a federal statute legalizing same-sex marriage. I posted to you that it is NOT a federal but a state issue.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.