Appellate court holds Apple liable for e-book price fixing

The LA Times reports:

A federal appeals court Tuesday let stand a 2013 lower court ruling that concluded Apple conspired with several top book publishers to raise e-book prices. The Justice Department had accused Apple of unfairly taking control of a nascent market that had been dominated by Amazon.com.

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[The court] wrote that Apple pressured publishers to band together to prevent price drops for books, both electronic and print. Apple had leveraged publisher frustration with Amazon’s $9.99 per book pricing on its Kindle reader as a bargaining chip, she said.

The publishers then “combined forces to grab control over price,” she wrote, referring to five of the “Big Six” publishers -- Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Hachette.

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Apple now may be ordered to pay $400 million to consumers, complying with a 2014 settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by 33 states and territories.

The full story is here.

The opinion of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is here.