Supreme Court Denies Apple's Cert Petition for Review of E-Books Case

The Supreme Court denied Apple’s petition for a writ of certiorari seeking a review of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling the company violated antitrust laws in its e-book pricing case. As is customary, the Supreme Court provided no reasoning in its Monday order denying cert. Apple’s cert petition had faced long odds of getting a Supreme Court review given the court’s history of taking few antitrust cases each year and the lack of a clear split among federal circuit courts on the issues in the case (see 1510300062). The Supreme Court’s denial of Apple’s cert petition means the company will now have to pay a $450 million settlement it agreed to pay to consumers and state attorneys general that had been contingent on the 2nd Circuit’s 2015 ruling (see 1506300067), DOJ said. “Apple’s liability for knowingly conspiring with book publishers to raise the prices of e-books is settled once and for all,” said DOJ Assistant Attorney General-Antitrust Division Bill Baer in a news release. Apple didn’t comment. Amazon said it’s “ready to distribute the court-mandated settlement funds to Kindle customers as soon as we’re instructed to move forward.” The Supreme Court needed to decide “whether Apple should even be allowed to argue that its arrangement could benefit consumers,” said TechFreedom President Berin Szoka in a blog post. “Apple made a strong case that its deal with publishers was critical to allowing it [to] compete with Amazon. The Supreme Court might or might not have found those arguments convincing, but it should have at least weighed them under antitrust’s flexible rule of reason. By letting the rigid per se deal stand as the controlling legal standard, the Court has ensured that antitrust law in general will put obsolete legal precedents from the pre-digital era above consumer welfare.”