Orin Snyder, a lawyer at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher who represents Apple, made that point in a Manhattan courtroom on Thursday, the last day of the three-week antitrust trial. He told Judge Denise L. Cote of United States District Court that if Apple was found liable for conspiring with publishers to raise e-book prices, “that precedent will send shudders through the business community.”
In the future, he said, retailers negotiating with content providers might then feel pressured to “not utter a word” about their discussions with other companies and offer substantially different terms to each party.
He said that in negotiations, businesses typically inform one competitor what another competitor is willing to do. “It is perfectly lawful to do all of that,” he said.
In its antitrust case brought a year ago, the federal government accused Apple of being the “ringmaster” in a conspiracy with five big book publishers to raise e-book prices across the industry. Before Apple entered the market in early 2010, Amazon controlled 90 percent of e-book sales, and the publishers were not happy with Amazon’s uniform price of $9.99 for e-books. The publishers have all settled their cases, but Apple has said it is fighting as a matter of principle because it has done nothing wrong.