Also right there in your quote is you saying that settlement doesn't imply guilt. We are beyond that point already.
So? What does that have to do with your previous comment?
Also right there in your quote is you saying that settlement doesn't imply guilt. We are beyond that point already.
I see a lot of people around here claiming bias, so I've got a question for you.
Why was Judge Cote biased? Who was she favoring? Amazon? Why would she favor Amazon over Apple in this situation? What would she have to gain by giving preferential treatment to one company over the other? How does it help the market by allowing one monopoly to survive while curtailing another before it became truly entrenched?
Well, that completely misses the point. Obviously, Amazon made profits under agency pricing. That has nothing to do with the claim.
But we've had this conversation before.
I see a lot of people around here claiming bias, so I've got a question for you.
Why was Judge Cote biased? Who was she favoring? Amazon? Why would she favor Amazon over Apple in this situation? What would she have to gain by giving preferential treatment to one company over the other? How does it help the market by allowing one monopoly to survive while curtailing another before it became truly entrenched?
So you didn't mean this?
DOJ sure seems to have a lot of free time on their hands... worrying about ebook sales and pricing...
And I still lack any reputable source backing up the claim that Amazon is not profitable in selling ebooks, or was not profitable selling ebooks before Agency came into play.
I can't speak for him, but I think that a certain amount of bias could have come in from overseeing the settlements with all the publishers. In addition to her famous quote about it being likely the DOJ would prove their case right before the trial started, she also stated the Apple colluded with the publishers a year before that.
Obviously, nothing presented during the settlement negotiations should have been considered at trial.
I agree that folks should make money on this business. Amazon supposedly makes money on eBooks if you calculate things traditionally, but some have argued that the DOJ's methods of calculating Amazon's revenue/profit are wrong for eBooks and that Amazon is indeed guilty of predatory pricing.
Basically, calculated as a physical good, Amazon's eBook business is profitable and therefore there are loss-leaders, but no predatory pricing. But calculated as what he terms a "public good" or "system good", they would certainly be considered guilty of predatory pricing by pricing the best sellers below cost.
In economics, a public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be effectively excluded from use and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others.
In economics, a good or service is called excludable if it is possible to prevent people (consumers) who have not paid for it from having access to it. By comparison, a good or service is non-excludable if non-paying consumers cannot be prevented from accessing it.
I dunno if I'd call that bias so much as overzealousness. The question is, if there was bias before the trial, did Judge Cote skew the evidence in favor of her opinion, or was she at least fair and impartial during?
I'm of BC2009's opinion here. Any potentially unfair verdicts would be due to misinterpretations of how the ebook market works rather than outright bias.
I'm not sure how that excuses trying to pass off unrelated information as relevant.
You're absolutely right, except in cases where a company decides it's more profitable to break the law and pay a fine rather than following the law in the first place.Government is overreaching here, by telling a corporation what they can and cannot do.
If the law is clear, Apple has to abide by it and if they don't they should get fined every time they break it until they do.
Anything else is not the DOJ's or a judges business.
The unrelated information is actually whether they use Agency or not. The claim was that Amazon is not profitable in selling ebooks, what they are using is irrelevant. Even if they switched back to wholesale it does not imply they are not profitable anymore.
No, the claim is that they weren't profitable in eBooks before Apple entered the market in early 2010.
Why would Apple want to use iBooks as a loss-leader? To get people to buy iPads? Doesn't make sense. No, Apple has always intended for iBooks to be a money maker. That's why this case is so interesting, because it appears to protect a monopoly like Amazon in the eBooks business, and prevent others from entering the market.
Our discussion was about the post-sentence market, not the pre-collusion one. It started from this post, with emphasis mine:
My opinion is that Amazon is still profitable in selling ebooks (and always was), so others are not prevented from entering the marked excluding for their own superior costs or unwillingness to operate on thin (but existing) margins.
If Amazon is actually not profitable in selling ebooks my opinion is that they are indeed most likely engaged in predatory pricing, but the if at the beginning of the sentence is not a detail.
Do you really think that Amazon makes a loss/thin margin because it sells some of ebooks as a loss leader or the fact that it reinvests all profit into infrastructure, growth and blanketing the world with shipping warehouses?
Obviously, I disagree and have presented multiple cites that overall profitability is not a defense against predatory pricing.
Government is overreaching here, by telling a corporation what they can and cannot do.
If the law is clear, Apple has to abide by it and if they don't they should get fined every time they break it until they do.
Anything else is not the DOJ's or a judges business.
Well, it's pretty clear now and they will get fined [again] if they break it again. In fact it was clear the first time around.
If Apple were smarter they would sell books dirt cheap so that people would buy more iPads, Apple's model is to sell hardware so they should break even on the content.
Erm no...the government is 100% correct, Apple broke the law.
There is a zero percent chance Apple did not know this behavior was illegal to begin with.
I wouldn't say it's overreaching - it is quite appropriate, but only after the judge made a completely wrong decision. There was no evidence that the publishers colluded, and there was even less evidence that Apple colluded with the publishers.
The result is that Amazon's eBook monopoly is strengthened.
You don't deal in absolutes all the time, do you?
Cannot Apple simply sue Amazon? It would not affect the collusion sentence but if there are so many arguments supporting a predatory pricing claim it seems a no-brainer to me.
Only when something is extremely clear which just happens to be this case.
Cannot Apple simply sue Amazon? It would not affect the collusion sentence but if there are so many arguments supporting a predatory pricing claim it seems a no-brainer to me.
Despite the fact that there are quite a few differing opinions with pretty substantial and convincing arguments to the contrary?
Are you also right 100% of the time?
I can't speak for him, but I think that a certain amount of bias could have come in from overseeing the settlements with all the publishers. In addition to her famous quote about it being likely the DOJ would prove their case right before the trial started, she also stated the Apple colluded with the publishers a year before that.
Obviously, nothing presented during the settlement negotiations should have been considered at trial.
Hrmm let me see, on one hand we have the DOJ and an established judge and on the other hand we have a bunch of thread posters in a Apple forum who think Apple did nothing wrong...who will I trust??
lol thats a tough for sure!
Where did the judge say that "there is a zero percent chance Apple did not know this behavior was illegal to begin with." Or was that a "thread poster" that made that up?