{"id":13417,"date":"2012-05-24T00:25:16","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T22:25:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=13417"},"modified":"2012-05-24T13:52:52","modified_gmt":"2012-05-24T11:52:52","slug":"apple-rejects-flawed-e-book-charges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/trending\/13417\/apple-rejects-flawed-e-book-charges\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple rejects “flawed” e-book charges"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apple Inc<\/a> is rejecting charges that it conspired to fix prices of electronic books, calling the U.S. government’s antitrust lawsuit a “fundamentally flawed” endeavor that could discourage competition and harm consumers.<\/p>\n

In a filing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan late Tuesday, Apple said it has not conspired with anyone or fixed prices for e-books in an effort to thwart Amazon.com Inc’s dominance of that fast-growing market.<\/p>\n

The Justice Department accused Apple in April of colluding with five publishers to boost e-book prices in early 2010, as the Silicon Valley giant was launching its popular iPad tablet.<\/p>\n

Amazon<\/a>, which makes the Kindle e-reader, had long sold e-books for as little as $9.99. The government complaint quoted Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs as wanting to offer publishers a means to boost prices, and “create a real mainstream e-books market at $12.99 and $14.99.”<\/p>\n

But Apple argued that its foray into e-books has actually fueled demand for e-books by forcing Amazon and rivals, including Barnes & Noble Inc, to compete more aggressively, including by upgrading e-reader technology.<\/p>\n

“Apple’s entry into e-book distribution is classic procompetitive conduct” that created competition where none existed, Apple said in its court papers.<\/p>\n

“For Apple to be subject to hindsight legal attack for a business strategy well-recognized as perfectly proper sends the wrong message to the market,” it added. “The government’s complaint against Apple is fundamentally flawed as a matter of fact and law.”<\/p>\n

Apple also denied that the government “accurately characterized” the comment attributed to Jobs.<\/p>\n

A Justice Department spokeswoman referred a request for comment to the announcement of the April 11 lawsuit, when Attorney General Eric Holder said the alleged collusion cost consumers millions of dollars on the most popular e-book titles.<\/p>\n

The publishers Macmillan and Penguin Group, which are respectively units of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH and Pearson Plc, are fighting the antitrust case.<\/p>\n

News Corp’s HarperCollins Publishers, CBS Corp’s Simon & Schuster and Lagardere SCA’s Hachette Book Group settled the case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apple Inc is rejecting charges that it conspired to fix prices of electronic books, calling the U.S. government’s antitrust lawsuit a “fundamentally flawed” endeavor that could discourage competition and harm consumers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":9715,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25,51,2176],"class_list":["post-13417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trending","tag-active","tag-apple","tag-e-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13417"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13489,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13417\/revisions\/13489"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}