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by jerf
2135 days ago
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The legal term you are looking for is "contract of adhesion": https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/adhesion_contract_%28contrac... However, a lot of the text around those contracts you'll find centers around a powerful entity like Apple adhering the contract to a nearly-powerless entity, like an individual consumer. I'm not up enough on the details of what case law has been created to know what happen to a contract of adhesion legally when the signer (Epic in this case) is not powerless themselves. Since Epic is at least nominally capable of negotiating their own contract with Apple on roughly equal terms, the contract may be treated more like a normal contract. My uninformed, personal guess is that Epic isn't conceptualizing this as a legal fight; I bet they think of this as a PR fight where the lawsuit is part of their PR narrative trying to get Apple to back down on their take. As a pure legal fight this doesn't strike me as a strong hand, but as a part of a larger PR fight... who knows. They may be trying to create a position to negotiate a settlement from. (If this is correct, and I were Epic, I'd be looking to partner with other very large and peeved developers, and create a de facto app producer strike... but maybe they think they have enough market clout to go it alone.) |
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This would actually be a violation of the antitrust laws. And it'd be a straightforward Section 1 Sherman Act cartel case.