The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has said that arguments made by various organisations objecting to the final judgment reached between the government and Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster over e-book price fixing charges raise no real new issues. The DoJ has therefore asked that the court approve the agreement without further hearings. The organisations objecting to the judgment include Apple, Macmillan and Penguin. Additionally a friend of the court brief had been filed by the ABA and Barnes & Noble.
According to a Publishers Weekly report, the DoJ maintains that arguments made by the parties that the government doesn't understand the e-book business is just a variation made by other industries at other times. DoJ wrote that while e-books are a relatively new arrival on the publishing scene, a plea for special treatment under the antitrust laws is an old standby. Railroads, publishers, lawyers, construction engineers, healthcare providers and oil companies are just some of the voices that have raised cries against 'ruinous competition' over the decades. Time and time again the courts have rejected the invitation to exempt particular businesses from the reach of the Sherman Act.
The new brief rebuts the separate filings made by Apple, Macmillan, Penguin and the ABA/Barnes & Noble. In dismissing the Penguin brief that argues that, overall, e-book prices have come down since the implementation of the agency model, the DoJ points to its own study that shows that the average price of a Penguin title sold through Amazon rose 17 percent after the implementation of the agency model and that the average price of new releases rose 21 percent. The DoJ provided two exhibits to support its claim of price increases, but continued to assert that it did not need to produce its internal economic analyses.
The DoJ counters Apple's objections by claiming that what troubles Apple the most was that the decree returned e-book pricing not only to Apple but to its competitors as well. It also wrote that Apple's desire to avoid price competition for as long as possible was the unstated reason why it sought to undo or forestall the settlements.
The DoJ also said there was little evidence to suggest that if the settlements were approved Amazon would return to a more dominant position in the e-book market, given the increased competition from a number of players including Microsoft's pending partnership with Barnes & Noble.
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