After being found guilty in federal court of conspiring to artificially inflate e-book prices, legal experts are estimating that Apple could owe as much as $500 million in damages.
GigaOm has shared a chart provided to the federal judge in the case by the Texas attorney general. It shows how much in damages the five publishers have been found liable and how much they have paid in settlements. The remainder -- after damages have been trebled for willful violations -- works out to roughly $500 million.
The chart shows that the publishers have paid out over $166 million so far. Earlier this month, a lawyer from Hagens Berman — the class action firm in the case — told my colleague Jeff Roberts that Apple would likely face a liability payment of harm to consumers times three, minus the $166 million already paid out by publishers. On Wednesday, Law360 reported (paywall) the same thing, calculating that if Apple loses its appeal it would face about $490 million in damages. I annotated the chart above with those figures.
Apple has indicated that it will appeal the guilty ruling and it's likely that it will be many months or even years before the case is resolved.
Wednesday April 30, 2025 3:59 am PDT by Tim Hardwick
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iPhone 17 Air dummy model alongside iPhone 16 Pro (credit: AppleTrack)
At just 5.5mm thick (excluding a slightly raised camera bump), the 6.6-inch iPhone 17 Air is expected to become ...
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Apple has completed Engineering Validation Testing (EVT) for at least one iPhone 17 model, according to a paywalled preview of an upcoming DigiTimes report.
iPhone 17 Air mockup based on rumored design
The EVT stage involves Apple testing iPhone 17 prototypes to ensure the hardware works as expected. There are still DVT (Design Validation Test) and PVT (Production Validation Test) stages to...
This week marks the 10th anniversary of the Apple Watch, which launched on April 24, 2015. Yesterday, we recapped features rumored for the Apple Watch Series 11, but since 2015, the Apple Watch has also branched out into the Apple Watch Ultra and the Apple Watch SE, so we thought we'd take a look at what's next for those product lines, too.
2025 Apple Watch Ultra 3
Apple didn't update the...
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...
Wednesday April 30, 2025 4:01 pm PDT by Juli Clover
In a victory for Epic Games, Apple was today found to be in violation of a 2021 injunction that required it to allow developers to direct customers to third-party purchase options on the web using in-app links.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who has been handling the Apple vs. Epic Games dispute for the last five years, said that Apple is in "willful violation" of the injunction she issued to ...
Tuesday April 29, 2025 7:00 am PDT by Tim Hardwick
Apple's iPhone 18 lineup will introduce a major leap in memory performance, according to new information shared today by Weibo-based leaker Digital Chat Station. Apple is reportedly planning to equip the 2026 models with a high-capacity six-channel LPDDR5X memory configuration, significantly upping the memory bandwidth for future AI features and multitasking.
Expanding the memory bandwidth...
This sounds like 'rob the rich' since they have the money...
Nah. Apple was really trying to scam us all into paying higher prices. It wasn't an accident that ebook prices went from a generally standard $10 to whatever the hell the publishers wanted when the iPad came around.
What I don't get is why in the original case part of their defense didn't include pointing out the Amazon was illegally selling ebooks below cost as an anti-competitive move, and that their model put a stop to that, which is why prices went up.
Actually, it is not illegal to sell books below cost. It may or may not be a smart business move, but it's not illegal.
What is illegal however is selling something (in this case books) at a set price and telling the manufacturer (in this case the publishers) that they can't let anyone else sell it for a lower price. This is what Apple was doing and why they should definitely be considered guilty.
Many gas stations tried something similar about 10 years ago and were fined for it. Retailers have tried this before and didn't get away with it. Why should Apple be let off the hook?
What I don't get is why in the original case part of their defense didn't include pointing out the Amazon was illegally selling ebooks below cost as an anti-competitive move, and that their model put a stop to that, which is why prices went up.
After being found guilty in federal court of conspiring to artificially inflate e-book prices, legal experts are estimating that Apple could owe as much as $500 million in damages.
