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by jerf 2135 days ago
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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>(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.)

This would actually be a violation of the antitrust laws. And it'd be a straightforward Section 1 Sherman Act cartel case.

> 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.

IDK. The jaded part of me asks whether Tencent pulled some strings here; a US company with Mindshare (Epic) is a better looking actor than the swaths of shovelware publishers that would stand to benefit from the long-term effects of a victory here.

I hope Epic doesn’t have a strategy that hinges on a PR win forcing apple to back down, because (A) as this thread is showing there are still a lot of people on apple’s side and (B) apple is usually quite vengeful in these things and will not back down here until compelled by court or law.

Just look at what happened to nvidia, for far minor offenses. They were blacklisted from apple’s platforms very thoroughly, and people still mostly side with apple on that one.

> (A) as this thread is showing there are still a lot of people on apple’s side

HN is unlikely to be an unbiased sample of the general population, along many axes.

Erm, people blame Nvidia because that one was Nvidia's fault?

Neither Apple nor the PCB manufacturers specified the failing solder balls that Nvidia used. Nvidia made and packaged those chips.

And then Nvidia failed to take responsibility when they failed because it was going to be so expensive.