Penguin Group Settles with Gov't in Apple Anti-Trust Case

[syrakusos]

The original anti-trust suit.

United States v. Apple, Inc., Hachette Book Group, Inc., HarperCollins Publishers L.L.C., Verlagsgruppe Georg Von Holtzbrinck GmbH, Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC d/b/a Macmillan, The Penguin Group, A Division of Pearson PLC, Penguin Group (USA), Inc., and Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Publisher Defendants feared that Amazon would resist any unilateral attempt to force an increase in e-book prices and that, even if an individual Publisher Defendant succeeded in such an attempt, that Publisher Defendant would lose sales to any competitors that had not forced the price of their books to supracompetitive levels. (Compl. ¶¶ 35-36, 46.) They met privately to discuss ways to collectively solve “the $9.99 problem.” (Compl. ¶¶ 39-45.) Ultimately, Publisher Defendants agreed to act collectively to raise retail e-book prices.
(Read full documents at DoJ Anti-Trust here.)

December 18, 2012 press release posted January 7, 2013.

Penguin agrees that it will cooperate in the United States' ongoing prosecution of this case, including substantially complying with the United States' requests for production, responding reasonably to requests to authenticate Penguin documents, making Penguin employees identified by the United States on December 7, 2012 as likely deponents available for deposition in the United States upon notice by the United States, and reasonably accommodating requests by the United States to make Penguin employees, wherever located, available for testimony at trial as needed.

Read the whole thing as one of the filings above here.