Apple, Publishers Facing Antitrust Lawsuit from Justice Dept

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coreym72

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Apple, please die already. I've been waiting since 1984. One of three things: Apple dies, I die, or the Sun becomes a Red Giant. Too bad only one will forcefully kill off Apple.
 

spookyman

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[citation][nom]house70[/nom]Ripping their customers off has always been Apple's policy, esp. under Jobs' reign.[/citation]

How else do you become rich?
 

slabbo

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I read a long time ago about how Amazon was complaining that Apple and the big Publishers were price fixing ebooks. And Amazon was still gonna sell their eBooks for $9.99 even though they were selling it at a lost. Guess it wasn't BS after all. Amazon should help this cause by providing documents they have on these publishers and really nail them.
 

blazorthon

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[citation][nom]dlbetty[/nom]It would seem that they are all guilty including Amazon who was undercutting the publishers and authors if they were selling the books at a loss, is this correct, so to change this they did this other model developed by jobs to keep what they deemed a fair price in play? I think they all suck and are evil just as with other media and pricing. I could understand pricing based on the need of new material and the author and publisher basing a price by that need, but I can't understand how any of what was done by all of them is okay or right. Someone can explain it in simpler terms if they would and I'm not stupid this is just over my head other than it appearing that they are all crooks to my eyes.[/citation]

There's nothing illegal about selling something for less than you paid for it. Collusion, multiple companies coming together to artificially raise the price of a product, is illegal. Plain and simple there. Amazon wanted to give us fair prices, the publishers said no, so Amazon decided to just take losses on each sale instead of not selling. This shows Amazon standing up for their customers instead of standing over them.

[citation][nom]freeinterweb[/nom]i dont get itpublishers give a 30% cut to appleand they wont let amazon sell it for the price they want which gives them more money due to the amount of customers it will bring in at lower prices...can someone explain the strategy behind this?[/citation]

The strategy is that the prices would climb up so much that Amazon would be forced to not make profits from selling their eBooks at fair prices. They wanted to force Amazon to sell eBooks for higher prices. Too bad for them that not only did it not work, but now there is proof against them and they're going to pay for it.

For example, lets say the publishers sell the eBook for $7.99 to Amazon and Amazon sells it to us for $9.99. Here, they make a $2 profit. However, the other companies wanted more money, so Apple decided to get the publishers in a collusion deal that gave Apple 30% of the money. The publishers still make more money by the prices being raise significantly.
 

maxwebb

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so the justice department is going to sue apple over this... where does that money go? i'm not seeing a benefit to the consumer.
 

maxwebb

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anyway, the justice department will probably find them guilty. they are price-fixing. and they are doing it at a rate of ~1.5x-2.5x the normal cost of the product.

well, why isn't there an anti-trust for verizon, att, etc? they're price-fixing too. and not just 2x, but 61,000,000x http://gthing.net/the-true-price-of-sms-messages

you'd think something as obvious as getting a burger at mcdonalds and being charged insane pricing like millions and millions of dollars would also qualify for "Justice Department's antitrust arm smelled foul play"
 
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