[hga]

In very brief, Apple and a half dozen publishers engaged in a white line price fixing conspiracy, all the publishers pled guilty, and naturally their counterparty was found guilty. A price fixing conspiracy that causes damage to consumers is white line illegal in the US; in this case, the prices of many ebooks went up by quite a bit.

Which leads straight to all but one of the remedies, like terminating all those deals with the publishers and for 5 years refraining from striking any vaguely similar deal with publishers. And extending this sort of thing to other media, seeing as how they are now a convicted (and unrepentant) price fixer.

As for the remaining remedy ... don't know about the legal basis for it, but Amazon was the main target of all the parties in the price fixing conspiracy.

There's a bit more detail here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._litigation#eBook_pri...

[jolohaga]

"in this case, the prices of many ebooks went up by quite a bit"

But no one was coerced into buying those books. Where's the crime?

[twoodfin]

Nobody is ever really coerced into buying airline tickets, but if Expedia sat the CEOs of the major U.S. airlines down and convinced them to all agree to raise prices, that would still be price fixing and illegal under the Sherman Act.

[hga]

The crime is that businesses are not allowed to get together and raise prices in concert like this.