Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca2-13-03741/USCOURTS-ca2-13-03741-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 410
Nature of Suit: Antitrust
Cause of Action: 

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1

13‐3741‐cv (L)  

United States v. Apple, Inc.

1 UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

2 FOR THE SECOND CIRCUIT

3

4 August Term 2014

5

6 (Argued: December 15, 2014    Decided: June 30, 2015)

7

8 Nos. 13‐3741‐cv, 13‐3748‐cv, 13‐3783‐cv, 13‐3857‐cv, 13‐3864‐cv, 13‐3867‐cv

9

10 ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

11

12 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, STATE OF TEXAS, STATE OF CONNECTICUT, STATE OF

13 ALABAMA, STATE OF ALASKA, STATE OF ARIZONA, STATE OF ARKANSAS, STATE OF

14 COLORADO, STATE OF DELAWARE, STATE OF IDAHO, STATE OF ILLINOIS, STATE OF

15 INDIANA, STATE OF IOWA, STATE OF KANSAS, STATE OF LOUISIANA, STATE OF

16 MARYLAND, COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS, STATE OF MICHIGAN, STATE OF

17 MISSOURI, STATE OF NEBRASKA, STATE OF NEW MEXICO, STATE OF NEW YORK, STATE

18 OF NORTH DAKOTA, STATE OF OHIO, COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA, STATE OF

19 SOUTH DAKOTA, STATE OF TENNESSEE, STATE OF UTAH, STATE OF VERMONT,

20 COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA, STATE OF WEST VIRGINIA, STATE OF WISCONSIN,

21 COMMONWEALTH OF PUERTO RICO, AND DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA,

22

23 Plaintiffs‐Appellees,

24

25 ‐v.‐ 

26

27 APPLE, INC., SIMON & SCHUSTER, INC., VERLAGSGRUPPE GEORG VON HOLTZBRINCK

28 GMBH, HOLTZBRINCK PUBLISHERS, LLC, DBA MACMILLAN, SIMON & SCHUSTER

29 DIGITAL SALES, INC.,

30

31 Defendants‐Appellants,

32    

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1 HACHETTE BOOK GROUP, INC., HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS L.L.C., THE PENGUIN

2 GROUP, A DIVISION OF PEARSON PLC, PENGUIN GROUP (USA), INC.,

3

4 Defendants.

5

6 ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

7

8 Before: JACOBS, LIVINGSTON, and LOHIER, Circuit Judges.

9

10 Defendants Apple, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster appeal from a

11 judgment of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New

12 York (Cote, J.), entered on September 5, 2013.   After a bench trial, the district

13 court concluded that Apple violated § 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, 15 U.S.C. §

14 1 et seq., by orchestrating a conspiracy among five major publishing companies to

15 raise the retail prices of digital books, known as “ebooks.”  The court then issued

16 an injunctive order, which, inter alia, prevents Apple from signing agreements

17 with those five publishers that restrict its ability to set, alter, or reduce the price

18 of ebooks, and requires Apple to apply the same terms and conditions to ebook

19 applications sold on its devices as it does to other applications.  We conclude that

20 the district court correctly decided that Apple orchestrated a conspiracy among

21 the publishers to raise ebook prices, that the conspiracy unreasonably restrained

22 trade in violation of § 1 of the Sherman Act, and that the injunction is properly

23 calibrated to protect the public from future anticompetitive harms.  In addition,

24 we reject the argument that the portion of the injunctive order preventing Apple

25 from agreeing to restrict its pricing authority modifies Macmillan and Simon &

26 Schuster’s consent decrees or should be judicially estopped.   Accordingly, the

27 judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED.

28

29 Raymond J. Lohier (Circuit Judge) files a separate concurring opinion, joining in

30 the judgment and in the majority opinion except for Part II.B.2.

31

32 Dennis Jacobs (Circuit Judge) files a separate dissenting opinion.

33

34 FOR PLAINTIFFS‐APPELLEES: MALCOLM L. STEWART, Deputy Solicitor

35 General, U.S. Department of Justice,

36 Washington, DC, William J. Baer, Assistant

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1 Attorney General, Mark W. Ryan, Daniel

2 McCuaig, Kristen C. Limarzi, Robert B.

3 Nicholson, David Seidman, Finnuala K.

4 Tessier, Lawrence B. Buterman, Attorneys,

5 U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust

6 Division, Washington, DC, for the United

7 States.

8

9 George Jepsen, Attorney General of

10 Connecticut, W. Joseph Nielsen, Assistant

11 Attorney General, Office of Attorney

12 General of Connecticut, Hartford, CT, Greg

13 Abbott, Attorney General of Texas, Daniel

14 T. Hodge, First Assistant Attorney General

15 of Texas, John Scott, Deputy Attorney

16 General of Texas, Jonathan F. Mitchell,

17 Solicitor General of Texas, Andrew

18 Oldham, Deputy Solicitor General of Texas,

19 John T. Prud’homme, Kim van Winkle, Eric

20 Lipman, Assistant Attorneys General,

21 Office of Attorney General of Texas, Austin,

22 TX, for Plaintiff‐States.

23

24 Eric T. Schneiderman, Attorney General of

25 the State of New York, Won S. Chin,

26 Assistant Solicitor General, Office of

27 Attorney General of New York, New York,

28 NY, for the State of New York.

29

30 FOR DEFENDANTS‐APPELLANTS: THEODORE J. BOUTROS, JR., Daniel G.

31 Swanson, Blaine H. Evanson, Gibson, Dunn

32 & Crutcher LLP, Los Angeles, CA, Cynthia

33 E. Richman, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP,

34 Washington, DC, Orin S. Snyder, Gibson,

35 Dunn & Crutcher LLP, New York, NY, for

36 Apple, Inc.

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1    

2 EAMON P. JOYCE, Joel M. Mitnick, Mark D.

3 Taticchi, Sidley Austin LLP, New York, NY,

4 for Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck

5 GmbH, Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC, d/b/a

6 Macmillan.

7    

8 GREGORY SILBERT, Yehuda L. Buchweitz,

9 Weil, James W. Quinn, Gotshal & Manges

10 LLP, New York, NY, for Simon & Schuster,

11 Inc. and Simon & Schuster Digital Sales, Inc.

12

13 DEBRA ANN LIVINGSTON, Circuit Judge:

14 Since the invention of the printing press, the distribution of books has

15 involved a fundamentally consistent process: compose a manuscript, print and

16 bind it into physical volumes, and then ship and sell the volumes to the public.  

17 In late 2007, Amazon.com, Inc. (“Amazon”) introduced the Kindle, a portable

18 device that carries digital copies of books, known as “ebooks.”  This innovation

19 had the potential to change the centuries‐old process for producing books by

20 eliminating the need to print, bind, ship, and store them.    Amazon began to

21 popularize the new way to read, and encouraged consumers to buy the Kindle

22 by offering desirable books — new releases and New York Times bestsellers — for

23 $9.99.    Publishing companies, which have traditionally stood at the center of the

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1 multi‐billion dollar book‐producing industry, saw Amazon’s ebooks, and

2 particularly its $9.99 pricing, as a threat to their way of doing business.

3 By November 2009, Apple, Inc. (“Apple”) had plans to release a new tablet

4 computer, the iPad.    Executives at the company saw an opportunity to sell

5 ebooks on the iPad by creating a virtual marketplace on the device, which came

6 to be known as the “iBookstore.”  Working within a tight timeframe, Apple went

7 directly into negotiations with six of the major publishing companies in the

8 United States.    In two months, it announced that five of those companies —

9 Hachette, Harpercollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster

10 (collectively, the “Publisher Defendants”) — had agreed to sell ebooks on the

11 iPad under arrangements whereby the publishers had the authority to set prices,

12 and could set the prices of new releases and New York Times bestsellers as high as

13 $19.99 and $14.99, respectively.  Each of these agreements, by virtue of its terms,

14 resulted in each Publisher Defendant receiving less per ebook sold via Apple as

15 opposed to Amazon, even given the higher consumer prices.  Just a few months

16 after the iBookstore opened, however, every one of the Publisher Defendants had

17 taken control over pricing from Amazon and had raised the prices on many of

18 their ebooks, most notably new releases and bestsellers.

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1 The United States Department of Justice (“DOJ” or “Justice Department”)

2 and 33 states and territories (collectively, “Plaintiffs”) filed suit in the United

3 States District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that Apple,

4 in launching the iBookstore, had conspired with the Publisher Defendants to

5 raise prices across the nascent ebook market.    This agreement, they argued,

6 violated § 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1 et seq. (“Sherman Act”),

7 and state antitrust laws.    All five Publisher Defendants settled and signed

8 consent decrees, which prohibited them, for a period, from restricting ebook

9 retailers’ ability to set prices.   Then, after a three‐week bench trial, the district

10 court (Cote, J.) concluded that, in order to induce the Publisher Defendants to

11 participate in the iBookstore and to avoid the necessity of itself competing with

12 Amazon over the retail price of ebooks, Apple orchestrated a conspiracy among

13 the Publisher Defendants to raise the price of ebooks — particularly new releases

14 and New York Times bestsellers.  United States v. Apple Inc., 952 F. Supp. 2d 638,

15 647 (S.D.N.Y. 2013).  The district court found that the agreement constituted a per

16 se violation of the Sherman Act and, in the alternative, unreasonably restrained

17 trade under the rule of reason.  See id. at 694.  On September 5, 2013, the district

18 court entered final judgment on the liability finding and issued an injunctive

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1 order that, inter alia, prevents Apple from entering into agreements with the

2 Publisher Defendants that restrict its ability to set, alter, or reduce the price of

3 ebooks, and requires Apple to apply the same terms and conditions to ebook

4 applications sold on its devices as it does to other applications.

5 On appeal, Apple contends that the district court’s liability finding was

6 erroneous and that the provisions of the injunction related to its pricing authority

7 and ebook applications are not necessary to protect the public.    Two of the

8 Publisher Defendants — Macmillan and Simon & Schuster — join the appeal,

9 arguing that the portion of the injunction related to Apple’s pricing authority

10 either unlawfully modifies their consent decrees or should be judicially

11 estopped.  We conclude that the district court’s decision that Apple orchestrated

12 a horizontal conspiracy among the Publisher Defendants to raise ebook prices is

13 amply supported and well‐reasoned, and that the agreement unreasonably

14 restrained trade in violation of § 1 of the Sherman Act.  We also conclude that the

15 district court’s injunction is lawful and consistent with preventing future

16 anticompetitive harms.

17 Significantly, the dissent agrees that Apple intentionally organized a

18 conspiracy among the Publisher Defendants to raise ebook prices.  Nonetheless,

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1 it contends that Apple was entitled to do so because the conspiracy helped it

2 become an ebook retailer.    In arriving at this startling conclusion — based in

3 large measure on an argument that Apple itself did not assert — the dissent

4 makes two fundamental errors.  The first is to insist that the vertical organizer of

5 a horizontal price‐fixing conspiracy may escape application of the per se rule.  

6 This conclusion is based on a misreading of Supreme Court precedent, which

7 establishes precisely the opposite.    The dissent fails to apprehend that the

8 Sherman Act outlaws agreements that unreasonably restrain trade and therefore

9 requires evaluating the nature of the restraint, rather than the identity of each

10 party who joins in to impose it, in determining whether the per se rule is properly

11 invoked.  Finally (and most fundamentally) the dissent’s conclusion rests on an

12 erroneous premise: that one who organizes a horizontal price‐fixing conspiracy

13 — the “supreme evil of antitrust,” Verizon Commc’ns Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V.

14 Trinko, LLP, 540 U.S. 398, 408 (2004) — among those competing at a different

15 level of the market has somehow done less damage to competition than its co‐

16 conspirators.  

17 The dissent’s second error is to assume, in effect, that Apple was entitled to

18 enter the ebook retail market on its own terms, even if these terms could be

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1 achieved only via its orchestration of and entry into a price‐fixing agreement

2 with the Publisher Defendants.  The dissent tells a story of Apple organizing this

3 price‐fixing conspiracy to rescue ebook retailers from a monopolist with

4 insurmountable retail power.  But this tale is not spun from any factual findings

5 of the district court.    And the dissent’s armchair analysis wrongly treats the

6 number of ebook retailers at any moment in the emergence of a new and

7 transformative technology for book distribution as the sine qua non of

8 competition in the market for trade ebooks.   

9 More fundamentally, the dissent’s theory — that the presence of a strong

10 competitor justifies a horizontal price‐fixing conspiracy — endorses a concept of

11 marketplace vigilantism that is wholly foreign to the antitrust laws.    By

12 organizing a price‐fixing conspiracy, Apple found an easy path to opening its

13 iBookstore, but it did so by ensuring that market‐wide ebook prices would rise to

14 a level that it, and the Publisher Defendants, had jointly agreed upon.  Plainly,

15 competition is not served by permitting a market entrant to eliminate price

16 competition as a condition of entry, and it is cold comfort to consumers that they

17 gained a new ebook retailer at the expense of passing control over all ebook

18 prices to a cartel of book publishers — publishers who, with Apple’s help,

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1 collectively agreed on a new pricing model precisely to raise the price of ebooks

2 and thus protect their profit margins and their very existence in the marketplace

3 in the face of the admittedly strong headwinds created by the new technology.

4 Because we conclude that the district court did not err in deciding that

5 Apple violated § 1 of the Sherman Act, and because we also conclude that the

6 district court’s injunction was lawful and consistent with preventing future

7 anticompetitive harms, we affirm.

8 BACKGROUND

I. Factual Background1 9

10 We begin not with Kindles and iPads, but with printed “trade books,”

11 which are “general interest fiction and non‐fiction” books intended for a broad

12 readership.  Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 648 n.4.  In the United States, the six largest

13 publishers of trade books, known in the publishing world as the “Big Six,” are

14 Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, Random House, and Simon &

                                               1 The factual background presented here is drawn from the district court’s factual

findings or from undisputed material in the record before the district court.   Because

this Court reviews the district court’s factual findings for “clear error,” we must assess

whether “its view of the evidence is plausible in light of the entire record.”  Cosme v.

Henderson, 287 F.3d 152, 158 (2d Cir. 2002).   In light of this obligation, the dissent is

wrong to suggest that citations to the record are inappropriate or misleading.  When a

fact comes from the district court’s opinion, we cite that opinion; when one comes from

the record, we cite the joint appendix (“J.A.”).   

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1 Schuster.  Together, the Big Six publish many of the biggest names in fiction and

2 non‐fiction; during 2010, their titles accounted for over 90% of the New York Times

3 bestsellers in the United States. Id. at 648 n.5.

4 For decades, trade book publishers operated under a fairly consistent

5 business model.    When a new book was ready for release to the public, the

6 publisher would sell hardcover copies to retailers at a “wholesale” price and

7 recommend resale to consumers at a markup, known as the “list” price.  After the

8 hardcover spent enough time on the shelves — often a year — publishers would

9 release a paperback copy at lower “list” and “wholesale” prices.    In theory,

10 devoted readers would pay the higher hardcover price to read the book when it

11 first came out, while more casual fans would wait for the paperback.

12 A. Amazon’s Kindle

13 On November 19, 2007, Amazon released the Kindle: a portable electronic

14 device that allows consumers to purchase, download, and read ebooks.  At the

15 time, there was only one other ereader available in the emerging ebook market,

16 and Amazon’s Kindle quickly gained traction.  In 2007, ebook revenue in North

17 America was only $70 million, a tiny amount relative to the approximately $30

18 billion market for physical trade books.  The market was growing, however; in

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1 2008 ebook revenue was roughly $140 million and, by the time Barnes & Noble,

2 Inc. (Barnes & Noble) launched its Nook ereader in November 2009, Amazon

3 was responsible for 90% of all ebook sales.  Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 648‐49.

4 Amazon followed a “wholesale” business model similar to the one used

5 with print books: publishers recommended a digital list price and received a

6 wholesale price for each ebook that Amazon sold.  In exchange, Amazon could

7 sell the publishers’ ebooks on the Kindle and determine the retail price.  At least

8 early on, publishers tended to recommend a digital list price that was about 20%

9 lower than the print list price to reflect the fact that, with an ebook, there is no

10 cost for printing, storing, packaging, shipping, or returning the books.   

11 Where Amazon departed from the publishers’ traditional business model

12 was in the sale of new releases and New York Times bestsellers.    Rather than

13 selling more expensive versions of these books upon initial release (as publishers

14 encouraged by producing hardcover books before paperback copies), Amazon

15 set the Kindle price at one, stable figure — $9.99.   At this price, Amazon was

16 selling “certain” new releases and bestsellers at a price that “roughly matched,”

17 or was slightly lower than, the wholesale price it paid to the publishers.  Apple,

18 952 F. Supp. 2d at 649.  David Naggar, a Vice President in charge of Amazon’s

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1 Kindle content, described this as a “classic loss‐leading strategy” designed to

2 encourage consumers to adopt the Kindle by discounting new releases and New

3 York Times bestsellers and selling other ebooks without the discount.  J.A. 1485.  

4 The district court also referred to this as a “loss leader[]” strategy, Apple, 952 F.

5 Supp. 2d at 650, 657, 708, and explained that Amazon “believed [the $9.99]

6 pricing would have long‐term benefits for its consumers,” id. at 649.  Contrary to

7 the dissent’s portrayal of the opinion, the district court did not find that Amazon

8 used the $9.99 price point to “assure[] its domination” in the ebook market, or

9 that its pricing strategy acted as a “barrier to entry” for other retailers.  

10 Dissenting Op. at 6‐7.   Indeed, in November 2009 — just a few months before

11 Apple’s launch of the iBookstore — Barnes & Noble entered the ebook retail

12 market by launching the Nook, Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 649 n.6, and as early as

13 2007 Google Inc. (“Google”) had been planning to enter the market using a

14 wholesale model, id. at 686.

15 B. The Publishers’ Reactions

16 Despite the small number of ebook sales compared to the overall market

17 for trade books, top executives in the Big Six saw Amazon’s $9.99 pricing

18 strategy as a threat to their established way of doing business.  Those executives

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1 included: Hachette and Hachette Livre Chief Executive Officers (“CEOs”) David

2 Young and Arnaud Nourry; HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray; Macmillan CEO

3 John Sargent; Penguin USA CEO David Shanks; Random House Chief Operating

4 Officer Madeline McIntosh; and Simon & Schuster President and CEO Carolyn

5 Reidy.  In the short term, these members of the Big Six thought that Amazon’s

6 lower‐priced ebooks would make it more difficult for them to sell hardcover

7 copies of new releases, “which were often priced,” as the district court noted, “at

8 thirty dollars or more,” Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 649, as well as New York Times

9 bestsellers.  Further down the road, the publishers feared that consumers would

10 become accustomed to the uniform $9.99 price point for these ebooks,

11 permanently driving down the price they could charge for print versions of the

12 books.  Moreover, if Amazon became powerful enough, it could demand lower

13 wholesale prices from the Big Six or allow authors to publish directly with

14 Amazon, cutting out the publishers entirely.  As Hachette’s Young put it, the idea

15 of the “wretched $9.99 price point becoming a de facto standard” for ebooks

16 “sickened” him.  J.A. 289.

17 The executives of the Big Six also recognized that their problem was a

18 collective one.  Thus, an August 2009 Penguin strategy report (concluded only a

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1 few months before Apple commenced its efforts to launch the iBookstore) noted

2 that “[c]ompetition for the attention of readers will be most intense from digital

3 companies whose objective may be to [cut out] traditional publishers altogether. .

4 . .    It will not be possible for any individual publisher to mount an effective

5 response, because of both the resources necessary and the risk of retribution, so

6 the industry needs to develop a common strategy.”  J.A. 287.  Similarly, Reidy

7 from Simon & Schuster opined in September 2009 that the publishers had “no

8 chance of success in getting Amazon to change its pricing practices” unless they

9 acted with a “critical mass,” and expressed the “need to gather more troops and

10 ammunition” before implementing a move against Amazon.   J.A. 290 (internal

11 quotation marks omitted).

12 Conveniently, the Big Six operated in a close‐knit industry and had no

13 qualms communicating about the need to act together.    As the district court

14 found (based on the Publisher Defendants’ own testimony), “[o]n a fairly regular

15 basis, roughly once a quarter, the CEOs of the [Big Six] held dinners in the

16 private dining rooms of New York restaurants, without counsel or assistants

17 present, in order to discuss the common challenges they faced.”    Apple, 952 F.

18 Supp. 2d at 651.  Because they “did not compete with each other on price,” but

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1 over authors and agents, the publishers “felt no hesitation in freely discussing

2 Amazon’s prices with each other and their joint strategies for raising those

3 prices.”  Id.  Those strategies included eliminating the discounted wholesale price

4 for ebooks and possibly creating an alternative ebook platform.   

5 The most significant attack that the publishers considered and then

6 undertook, however, was to withhold new and bestselling books from Amazon

7 until the hardcover version had spent several months in stores, a practice known

8 as “windowing.”  Members of the Big Six both kept one another abreast of their

plans to window, and actively pushed others toward the strategy.2 9   By December

10 2009, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times were reporting that four of the

11 Big Six had announced plans to delay ebook releases until after the print release,

12 and the two holdouts — Penguin and Random House — faced pressure from

13 their peers.

                                               2 Citing one example, the district court referenced a fall 2009 email in which

Hachette’s Young informed his colleague Nourry of Simon & Schuster’s windowing

plans, advising “[c]ompletely confidentially, Carolyn [Reidy] has told me that they

[Simon & Schuster] are delaying the new Stephen King, with his full support, but will

not be announcing this until the day after Labor Day.”  Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 652

(first and second alterations in original) (internal quotation marks omitted).  The district

court went on to observe that Young, “[u]nderstanding the impropriety of this

exchange of confidential information with a competitor, . . . advised Nourry that ‘it

would be prudent for you to double delete this from your email files when you return

to your office.’”  Id.

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1 Ultimately, however, the publishers viewed even this strategy to save their

2 business model as self‐destructive.  Employees inside the publishing companies

3 noted that windowing encouraged piracy, punished ebook consumers, and

4 harmed long‐term sales.  One author wrote to Sargent in December 2009 that the

5 “old model has to change” and that it would be better to “embrace e‐books,”

6 publish them at the same time as the hardcovers, “and pray to God they both sell

7 like crazy.”  J.A. 325.  Sargent agreed, but expressed the hope that ebooks could

8 eventually be sold for between $12.95 and $14.95.  “The question is,” he mused,

9 “how to get there?”  J.A. 325.

10 C. Apple’s Entry into the ebook Market

11 Apple is one of the world’s most innovative and successful technology

12 companies.    Its hardware sells worldwide and supports major software

13 marketplaces like iTunes and the App Store.    But in 2009, Apple lacked a

14 dedicated marketplace for ebooks or a hardware device that could offer an

15 outstanding reading experience.  The pending release of the iPad, which Apple

16 intended to announce on January 27, 2010, promised to solve that hardware

17 deficiency.

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1 Eddy Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services

2 and the director of Apple’s digital content stores, saw the opportunity for an

3 ebook marketplace on the iPad.  By February 2009, Cue and two colleagues —

4 Kevin Saul and Keith Moerer — had researched the ebook market and concluded

5 that it was poised for rapid expansion in 2010 and beyond.  While Amazon had

6 an estimated 90% market share in trade ebooks, Cue believed that Apple could

7 become a powerful player in the market in large part because consumers would

8 be able to do many tasks on the iPad, and would not want to carry a separate

9 Kindle for reading alone.    In an email to Apple’s then‐CEO, Steve Jobs, he

10 discussed the possibility of Amazon selling ebooks through an application on the

11 iPad, but felt that “it would be very easy for [Apple] to compete with and . . .

12 trounce Amazon by opening up our own ebook store” because “[t]he book

13 publishers would do almost anything for [Apple] to get into the ebook business.”  

14 J.A. 282.

15 Jobs approved Cue’s plan for an ebook marketplace — which came to be

16 known as the iBookstore — in November 2009.  Although the iPad would go to

17 market with or without the iBookstore, Apple hoped to announce the ebook

18 marketplace at the January 27, 2010 iPad launch to “ensure maximum consumer

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1 exposure” and add another “dramatic component” to the event.    Apple, 952 F.

2 Supp. 2d at 655.  This left Cue and his team only two months amidst the holiday

3 season both to create a business model for the iBookstore and to assemble a

4 group of publishers to participate.    Cue also had personal reasons to work

5 quickly.  He knew that Jobs was seriously ill, and that, by making the iBookstore

6 a success, he could help Jobs achieve a longstanding goal of creating a device that

7 provides a superior reading experience.

8 Operating under a tight timeframe, Cue, Saul, and Moerer streamlined

9 their efforts by focusing on the Big Six publishers.    They began by arming

10 themselves with some important information about the state of affairs within the

11 publishing industry.  In particular, they learned that the publishers feared that

12 Amazon’s pricing model could change their industry, that several publishers had

13 engaged in simultaneous windowing efforts to thwart Amazon, and that the

14 industry as a whole was in a state of turmoil.  “Apple understood,” as the district

15 court put it, “that the Publishers wanted to pressure Amazon to raise the $9.99

16 price point for e‐books, that the Publishers were searching for ways to do that,

17 and that they were willing to coordinate their efforts to achieve that goal.”  Id. at

18 656.  For its part, as the district court found, Apple was willing to sell ebooks at

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1 higher prices, but “had decided that it would not open the iBookstore if it could

2 not make money on the store and compete effectively with Amazon.”  Id.

3 D. Apple’s Negotiations with the Publishers

4 1. Initial Meetings

5 Apple held its first meetings with each of the Big Six between December 15

6 and 16.  The meetings quickly confirmed Cue’s suspicions about the industry.  As

7 he wrote to Jobs after speaking with three of the publishers, “[c]learly, the

8 biggest issue is new release pricing” and “Amazon is definitely not liked much

9 because of selling below cost for NYT Best Sellers.”  J.A. 326‐27.  Many publishers

10 also emphasized that they were searching for a strategy to regain control over

11 pricing.  Apple informed each of the Big Six that it was negotiating with the other

12 major publishers, that it hoped to begin selling ebooks within the next 90 days,

13 and that it was seeking a critical mass of participants in the iBookstore and

14 would launch only if successful in reaching this goal.    Apple informed the

15 publishers that it did not believe the iBookstore would succeed unless publishers

16 agreed both not to window books and to sell ebooks at a discount relative to their

17 physical counterparts.  Apple noted that ebook prices in the iBookstore needed to

18 be comparable to those on the Kindle, expressing the view, as Reidy recorded,

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1 that it could not “tolerate a market where the product is sold significantly more

2 cheaply elsewhere.”    Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 657 (internal quotation marks

3 omitted).    Most importantly for the publishers, however, Cue’s team also

4 expressed Apple’s belief that Amazon’s $9.99 price point was not ingrained in

5 consumers’ minds, and that Apple could sell new releases and New York Times

6 bestsellers for somewhere between $12.99 and $14.99.  In return, Apple requested

7 that the publishers decrease their wholesale prices so that the company could

8 make a small profit on each sale.   

9 These meetings spurred a flurry of communications reporting on the

10 “[t]errific news[,]” as Reidy put it in an email to Leslie Moonves, her superior at

11 parent company CBS Corporation (“CBS”), that Apple “was not interested in a

12 low price point for digital books” and didn’t want “Amazon’s $9.95 [sic] to

13 continue.”    Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 658 (first alteration in original) (internal

14 quotation marks omitted).    Significantly, these communications included

15 numerous exchanges between executives at different Big Six publishers who, the

16 district court found, “hashed over their meetings with Apple with one another.”  

17 Id.  The district court found that the frequent telephone calls among the Publisher

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1 Defendants during the period of their negotiations with Apple “represented a

2 departure from the ordinary pattern of calls among them.”  Id. at 655 n.14.

3 2. The Agency Model

4 Meanwhile, Cue, Moerer, and Saul returned to Apple’s headquarters to

5 develop a business model for the iBookstore.  Although the team was optimistic

6 about the initial meetings, they remained concerned about whether the

7 publishers would reduce wholesale prices on new releases and bestsellers by a

8 large enough margin to allow Apple to offer competitive prices and still make a

9 profit.   One strategy that the team considered was to ask publishers for a 25%

10 wholesale discount on all of these titles, so if a physical book sold at $12

11 wholesale (the going rate for the majority of New York Times bestsellers) Apple

12 could purchase the ebook version for $9 and offer it on the iBookstore at a small

13 markup.    But Cue was aware that some publishers had increased Amazon’s

14 digital wholesale prices in 2009 in an unsuccessful effort to convince Amazon to

15 change its pricing.  Id. at 650; J.A. 1771.  Cue felt it would be difficult to negotiate

16 wholesale prices down far enough “for [Apple] to generally compete profitably

17 with Amazon’s below‐cost pricing on the most popular e‐books.”  J.A. 1772.  As

18 Cue saw it, Apple’s most valuable bargaining chip came from the fact that the

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23

1 publishers were desperate “for an alternative to Amazon’s pricing policies and

2 excited about . . . the prospect that [Apple’s] entry [into the ebook market] would

3 give them leverage in their negotiations with Amazon.”  Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at

4 659.  

5 It was at this point that Cue’s team, recognizing its opportunity,

abandoned the wholesale business model for a new, agency model.3 6    Unlike a

7 wholesale model, in an agency relationship the publisher sets the price that

8 consumers will pay for each ebook.    Then, rather than the retailer paying the

9 publisher for each ebook that it sells, the publisher pays the retailer a fixed

10 percentage of each sale.    In essence, the retailer receives a commission for

11 distributing the publisher’s ebooks.  Under the system Apple devised, publishers

12 would have the freedom to set ebook prices in the iBookstore, and would keep

13 70% of each sale.  The remaining 30% would go to Apple as a commission.  

14 This switch to an agency model obviated Apple’s concerns about

15 negotiating wholesale prices with the Big Six while ensuring that Apple profited

16 on every sale.  It did not, however, solve all of the company’s problems.  Because

17 the agency model handed the publishers control over pricing, it created the risk

                                               3 Notably, the possibility of an agency arrangement was first mentioned by

Hachette and HarperCollins as a way “to fix Amazon pricing.”  J.A. 346.

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1 that the Big Six would sell ebooks in the iBookstore at far higher prices than

2 Kindle’s $9.99 offering.  If the prices were too high, Apple could be left with a

3 brand new marketplace brimming with titles, but devoid of customers.   

4 To solve this pricing problem, Cue’s team initially devised two strategies.  

5 First, they realized that they could maintain “realistic prices” by establishing

6 price caps for different types of books.   J.A. 359.   Of course, these caps would

7 need to be higher than Amazon’s $9.99 price point, or Apple would face the same

8 difficult price negotiations that it sought to avoid by switching away from the

9 wholesale model.  But at this point Apple was not content to open its iBookstore

10 offering prices higher than the competition.  For as the district court found, if the

11 Publisher Defendants “wanted to end Amazon’s $9.99 pricing,” Apple similarly

12 desired “that there be no price competition at the retail level.”    Apple, 952 F.

13 Supp. 2d at 647.

14   Apple next concluded, then, as the district court found, that “[t]o ensure

15 that the iBookstore would be competitive at higher prices, Apple . . . needed to

16 eliminate all retail price competition.”    Id. at 659.    Thus, rather than simply

17 agreeing to price caps above Amazon’s $9.99 price point, Apple created a second

18 requirement: publishers must switch all of their other ebook retailers —

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1 including Amazon — to an agency pricing model.    The result would be that

2 Apple would not need to compete with Amazon on price, and publishers would

3 be able to eliminate Amazon’s $9.99 pricing.  Or, as Cue would later describe the

4 plan to executives at Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Random House, the plan

5 “solve[d] [the] Amazon issue” by allowing the publishers to wrest control over

pricing from Amazon.4 6   Id. at 661 (internal quotation marks omitted).

7 On January 4 and 5, Apple sent essentially identical emails to each member

8 of the Big Six to explain its agency model proposal.   Each email described the

9 commission split between Apple and the publishers and recommended three

10 price caps: $14.99 for hardcover books with list prices above $35; $12.99 for

11 hardcover books with list prices below $35; and $9.99 for all other trade books.  

12 The emails also explained that, “to sell ebooks at realistic prices . . . all [other]

13 resellers of new titles need to be in [the] agency model” as well.  J.A. 360.  Or, as

14 Cue told Reidy, “all publishers” would need to move “all retailers” to an agency

15 model.  J.A. 2060.  

                                               4 Cue testified at trial that his reference to “solv[ing] the Amazon issue” denoted

the proposal to price ebooks in the iBookstore above $9.99, and was not a reference to

raising prices across the industry or wresting control over pricing from Amazon.  In this

and other respects, the district court found Cue’s testimony to be “not credible” — a

determination that, on this record, is in no manner erroneous, much less clearly so.  Id.

at 661 n.19.  As the district court put it, “Apple’s pitch to the Publishers was — from

beginning to end — a vision for a new industry‐wide price schedule.”  Id.

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1 3. The “Most‐Favored‐Nation” Clause

2 Cue’s thoughts on the agency model continued to evolve after the emails

3 on January 4 and 5.    Most significantly, Saul — Cue’s in‐house counsel —

4 devised an alternative to explicitly requiring publishers to switch other retailers

5 to agency.  This alternative involved the use of a “most‐favored nation” clause

6 (“MFN Clause” or “MFN”).    In general, an MFN Clause is a contractual

7 provision that requires one party to give the other the best terms that it makes

8 available to any competitor.    In the context of Apple’s negotiations, the MFN

9 Clause mandated that, “[i]f, for any particular New Release in hardcover format,

10 the . . .  Customer Price [in the iBookstore] at any time is or becomes higher than

11 a customer price offered by any other reseller . . . , then [the] Publisher shall

12 designate a new, lower Customer Price [in the iBookstore] to meet such lower

13 [customer price].”    J.A. 559.    Put differently, the MFN would require the

14 publisher to offer any ebook in Apple’s iBookstore for no more than what the

15 same ebook was offered elsewhere, such as from Amazon.

16 On January 11, Apple sent each of the Big Six a proposed eBook Agency

17 Distribution Agreement (the “Contracts”).  As described in the January 4 and 5

18 emails, these Contracts would split the proceeds from each ebook sale between

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1 the publisher and Apple, with the publisher receiving 70%, and would set price

2 caps on ebooks at $14.99, $12.99, and $9.99 depending on the book’s hardcover

3 price.    But unlike the initial emails, the Contracts contained MFN Clauses in

4 place of the requirement that publishers move all other retailers to an agency

5 model.  Apple then assured each member of the Big Six that it was being offered

6 the same terms as the others.

7 The Big Six understood the economic incentives that the MFN Clause

8 created.    Suppose a new hardcover release sells at a list price of $25, and a

9 wholesale price of $12.50.  With Amazon, the publishers had been receiving the

10 wholesale price (or a slightly lower digital wholesale price) for every ebook copy

11 of the volume sold on Kindle, even if Amazon ultimately sold the ebook for less

12 than that wholesale price.  Under Apple’s initial agency model — with price caps

13 but no MFN Clause — the publishers already stood to make less money per

14 ebook with Apple.  Because Apple capped the ebook price of a $25 hardcover at

15 $12.99 and took 30% of that price, publishers could only expect to make $8.75 per

16 sale.    But what the publishers sacrificed in short‐term revenue, they hoped to

17 gain in long‐term stability by acquiring more control over pricing and,

18 accordingly, the ability to protect their hardcover sales.   

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1 The MFN Clause changed the situation by making it imperative, not

2 merely desirable, that the publishers wrest control over pricing from ebook

3 retailers generally.  Under the MFN, if Amazon stayed at a wholesale model and

4 continued to sell ebooks at $9.99, the publishers would be forced to sell in the

5 iBookstore, too, at that same $9.99 price point.  The result would be the worst of

6 both worlds: lower short‐term revenue and no control over pricing.    The

7 publishers recognized that, as a practical matter, this meant that the MFN Clause

8 would force them to move Amazon to an agency relationship.  As Reidy put it,

9 her company would need to move all its other ebook retailers to agency “unless

10 we wanted to make even less money” in this growing market.    Apple, 952 F.

11 Supp. 2d at 666 (internal quotation marks omitted).  This situation also gave each

12 of the publishers a stake in Apple’s quest to have a critical mass of publishers join

13 the iBookstore because, “[w]hile no one Publisher could effect an industry‐wide

14 shift in prices or change the public’s perception of a book’s value, if they moved

15 together they could.”  Id. at 665; see also J.A. 1981.   

16 Apple understood this dynamic as well.    As the district court found,

17 “Apple did not change its thinking” when it replaced the explicit requirement

18 that the publishers move other retailers to an agency model with the MFN.  

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1 Indeed, in the following weeks, Apple assiduously worked to make sure that the

2 shift to agency occurred.    Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 663.    But Apple also

3 understood that, as Cue bluntly put it, “any decent MFN forces the model” away

4 from wholesale and to agency.  Id. (internal quotation marks omitted).  Or as the

5 district court found, “the MFN protected Apple from retail price competition as it

6 punished a Publisher if it failed to impose agency terms on other e‐tailers.”  Id. at

7 665.

8 Thus, the terms of the negotiation between Apple and the publishers

9 became clear: Apple wanted quick and successful entry into the ebook market

10 and to eliminate retail price competition with Amazon.  In exchange, it offered

11 the publishers an opportunity “to confront Amazon as one of an organized

12 group . . . united in an effort to eradicate the $9.99 price point.”  Id. at 664.  Both

13 sides needed a critical mass of publishers to achieve their goals.    The MFN

14 played a pivotal role in this quid pro quo by “stiffen[ing] the spines of the

15 [publishers] to ensure that they would demand new terms from Amazon,” and

16 protecting Apple from retail price competition.  Id. at 665.

17

18

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1 4. Final Negotiations

2 The proposed Contracts sparked intense negotiations as Cue’s team raced

3 to assemble enough publishers to announce the iBookstore by January 27.  The

4 publishers’ first volley was to push back on Apple’s price caps, which they

recognized would become the “standard across the industry” for pricing.5 5   J.A.

6 571.  In a set of meetings between January 13 and 14, the majority of the Big Six

7 expressed a general willingness to adopt an agency model, but refused to do so

8 with the price limits Apple demanded.    Cue responded by asking Jobs for

9 permission to create a more lenient price cap system.   Under this new regime,

10 New York Times bestsellers could sell for $14.99 if the hardcover was listed above

11 $30, and for $12.99 if listed below that price.  As for new releases, a $12.99 cap

12 would apply to hardcovers priced between $25 and $27.50; a $14.99 cap would

13 apply to hardcovers selling for up to $30; and, if the hardcover sold for over $30,

14 publishers could sell the ebook for between $16.99 and $19.99.  Jobs responded

15 that he could “live with” the pricing “as long as [the publishers] move Amazon

16 to the agen[cy] model too.”  J.A. 499.  

                                              

5 As one HarperCollins executive put it, the “upshot” of moving to the agency

model and adopting price caps was that “Apple would control price and that price

would be standard across the industry.”    Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 670 (internal

quotation marks omitted).

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1 Cue proposed this new pricing regime to the Big Six on January 16 and,

2 with only 11 days remaining before the iPad launch, turned up the pressure.  In

3 each email conveying the new prices, Cue reminded the publishers that, if they

4 did not agree to the iBookstore by the 27th, other companies, including Amazon

5 and Barnes & Noble, would certainly build their own book store apps for the

6 iPad.    Correspondence from within the publishing companies also shows that

7 Cue promoted the proposal as the “best chance for publishers to challenge the

8 9.99 price point,” and emphasized that Apple would “not move forward with the

9 store [unless] 5 of the 6 [major publishers] signed the agreement.”  J.A. 522‐23.  

10 As Cue said at trial, he attempted to “assure [the publishers] that they weren’t

11 going to be alone, so that [he] would take the fear awa[y] of the Amazon

12 retribution that they were all afraid of.”    J.A. 2068 (internal quotation marks

13 omitted).  “The Apple team reminded the Publishers,” as the district court found,

14 “that this was a rare opportunity for them to achieve control over pricing.”  

15 Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 664.

16 By January 22, two publishers — Simon & Schuster and Hachette — had

17 verbally committed to join the iBookstore, while a third, Penguin, had agreed to

18 Apple’s terms in principle.  As for the others, Cue was frustrated that they kept

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1 “chickening out” because of the “dramatic business change” that Apple was

2 proposing.  J.A. 547.  To make matters worse, “[p]ress reports on January 18 and

3 19 alerted the publishing world and Amazon to the Publishers’ negotiations with

4 Apple,” Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 670‐71, and Amazon learned from Random

5 House that it was facing “pressure from other publishers . . . to move to [the]

6 agency model because Apple had made it clear that unless all of the Big Six

7 participated, they wouldn’t bother with building a bookstore,” J.A. 1520.  

8 Representatives from Amazon descended on New York for a set of long‐

9 scheduled meetings with the publishers.    As the district court found, “[i]n

10 separate conversations on January 20 and over the next few days, the Publisher

11 Defendants all told Amazon that they wanted to change to an agency

12 distribution model with Amazon.”  Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 672.

13 Macmillan, however, presented an issue for Apple.    The district court

14 found that at a January 20 lunch between John Sargent and Amazon, Sargent

15 “announced that Macmillan was planning to offer Amazon the option to choose

16 either an agency [or wholesale] model.”  Id.  But at dinner with Cue that night,

17 according to the district court, Cue made sure that Sargent understood the

18 consequences of the MFN, explaining “that Macmillan had no choice but to move

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1 Amazon to an agency model if it wanted to sign an agency agreement with

Apple.”6 2     Id.    The next day, Sargent emailed Cue to express his continued

3 reservations about switching Macmillan’s other retailers to an agency

4 relationship.  

5 With the iPad launch fast approaching, Cue enlisted the help of others.  

6 Cue had received an email from Simon & Schuster’s Carolyn Reidy, who had

7 already verbally committed to Apple’s terms and whom Cue would later call the

8 “real leader of the book industry,” moments after hearing from Sargent.  J.A. 621.  

9 Cue then spoke with Reidy for twenty minutes before reaching out to Brian

10 Murray, who, as the district court found, “was fully supportive of the

11 requirement that all e‐tailers be moved to an agency model.”  Apple, 952 F. Supp.

12 2d at 673 n.39.    After the discussions, Cue asked Sargent to speak with both

13 Reidy and Murray.  Sargent complied, and “spoke to both Murray and Reidy by

14 telephone for eight and fifteen minutes, respectively.”  Id. at 673.  Minutes later,

15 Sargent called the Amazon representative to inform him that Macmillan planned

16 to sign an agreement that “required” the company to conduct business with

                                               6 Although Cue denied discussing the MFN that night, the district court found

this testimony not credible in light of Cue’s deposition testimony and his

contemporaneous email to Jobs that Sargent had “legal concerns over the price‐

matching.”  Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 672 n.38 (internal quotation marks omitted).  This

determination was not clearly erroneous.

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1 Amazon through an agency model.  Id.  By January 23, Macmillan had verbally

2 agreed to join the iBookstore.

3 Cue followed a similar strategy with Penguin.    While Penguin’s CEO

4 David Shanks agreed to Apple’s terms on January 22, he informed Cue that he

5 would join the iBookstore only if four other publishers agreed to participate.  By

6 January 25, Apple had signatures from three publishers but Penguin was still

7 noncommittal.  Cue called Shanks, and the two spoke for twenty minutes.  “Less

8 than an hour [later], Shanks called Reidy to discuss Penguin’s status in its

9 negotiations with Apple.”  Id. at 675.  Penguin signed the Contract that afternoon.

10 HarperCollins was the fifth, and final, publisher to agree in principle to

11 Apple’s proposal.  Murray, its CEO, “remained unhappy over the size of Apple’s

12 commission and the existence of price caps.”  Id. at 673 n.39.  Unable to negotiate

13 successfully with Murray, Cue asked Jobs to contact James Murdoch, the CEO of

14 the publisher’s parent company, and “tell him we have 3 signed so there is no

15 leap of faith here.”  Id. at 675 (internal quotation marks omitted).  After a series of

16 emails, Jobs summarized Apple’s position to Murdoch:

17 [W]e simply don’t think the ebook market can be successful with

18 pricing higher than $12.99 or $14.99.  Heck, Amazon is selling these

19 books at $9.99, and who knows, maybe they are right and we will

20 fail even at $12.99.    But we’re willing to try at the prices we’ve

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1 proposed. . . . As I see it, [HarperCollins] has the following choices:

2 (1) Throw in with [A]pple and see if we can all make a go of this to

3 create a real mainstream ebooks market at $12.99 and $14.99.    (2)

4 Keep going with Amazon at $9.99.  You will make a bit more money

5 in the short term, but in the medium term Amazon will tell you they

6 will be paying you 70% of $9.99.  They have shareholders too.  (3)

7 Hold back your books from Amazon.  Without a way for customers

8 to buy your ebooks, they will steal them.

9

10 Id. at 677. Cue also emailed Murray to inform him that four other publishers had

11 signed their agreements.    Murray then called executives at both Hachette and

12 Macmillan before agreeing to Apple’s terms.

13 As the district court found, during the period in January during which

14 Apple concluded its agreements with the Publisher Defendants, “Apple kept the

15 Publisher Defendants apprised about who was in and how many were on

board.”7 16   Id. at 673.  The Publisher Defendants also kept in close communication.  

17 As the district court noted, “[i]n the critical negotiation period, over the three

18 days between January 19 and 21, Murray, Reidy, Shanks, Young, and Sargeant

19 called one another 34 times, with 27 calls exchanged on January 21 alone.”  Id. at

20 674.

                                               7 Indeed, on the morning of January 21, Apple’s initial deadline for the

publishers to commit to agency, Simon & Schuster’s Reidy emailed Cue to get ”an

update on your progress in herding us cats.”  J.A. 543.

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1 By the January 27 iPad launch, five of the Big Six — Hachette,

2 HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster — had agreed to

3 participate in the iBookstore.    The lone holdout, Random House, did not join

4 because its executives believed it would fare better under a wholesale pricing

5 model and were unwilling to make a complete switch to agency pricing.  Steve

6 Jobs announced the iBookstore as part of his presentation introducing the iPad.  

7 When asked after the presentation why someone should purchase an ebook from

8 Apple for $14.99 as opposed to $9.99 with Amazon or Barnes & Noble, Jobs

9 confidently replied, “[t]hat won’t be the case . . . the price will be the same. . . .

10 [P]ublishers will actually withhold their [e]books from Amazon . . . because they

are not happy with the price.”8 11     A day later, Jobs told his biographer the

12 publishers’ position with Amazon: “[y]ou’re going to sign an agency contract or

13 we’re not going to give you the books.”    J.A. 891 (internal quotation marks

14 omitted).

15

16

                                               8 On January 29, Simon & Schuster’s general counsel wrote to Reidy that she

“[could not] believe that Jobs made [this] statement,” which she considered

“[i]ncredibly stupid.”  J.A. 638.

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1 E. Negotiations with Amazon

2 Jobs’s boast proved to be prophetic.  While the Publisher Defendants were

3 signing Apple’s Contracts, they were also informing Amazon that they planned

4 on changing the terms of their agreements with it to an agency model.  However,

5 their move against Amazon began in earnest on January 28, the day after the iPad

6 launch.  That afternoon, John Sargent flew to Seattle to deliver an ultimatum on

7 behalf of Macmillan: that Amazon would switch its ebook sales agreement with

8 Macmillan to an agency model or suffer a seven‐month delay in its receipt of

Macmillan’s new releases.9 9     Amazon responded by removing the option to

10 purchase Macmillan’s print and ebook titles from its website.

11 Sargent, as the district court found, had informed Cue of his intention to

confront Amazon before ever leaving for Seattle.10 12   Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 678.  

13 On his return, he emailed Cue to inform him about Amazon’s decision to remove

                                               9 As the district court found, “[s]even months was no random period — it was

the number of months for which titles were designated New Release titles under the

Apple Agreement and restrained by the Apple price caps and MFN.”    Apple, 952 F.

Supp. 2d at 679.

10 At trial, Cue claimed he had no advance knowledge of Sargent’s plan to go to

Seattle, but the district court found this testimony to be incredible.  Sargent had emailed

Cue about his trip days before the meeting took place.  Moreover, on January 28, the

day of the meeting, Jobs told his biographer that the Publisher Defendants “went to

Amazon and said, ‘You’re going to sign an agency contract or we’re not going to give

you the books.’”  Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 678 n.47.  The district court’s assessment of

Cue’s credibility was not clearly erroneous.

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1 Macmillan ebooks from Kindle, adding a note to say that he wanted to “make

2 sure you are in the loop.”    J.A. 640.    Sargent also wrote a public letter to

3 Macmillan’s authors and agents, describing the Amazon negotiations.  Hachette’s

4 Arnaud Nourry emailed the CEO of Macmillan’s parent company to express his

5 “personal support” for Macmillan’s actions and to “ensure [him] that [he was]

6 not going to find [his] company alone in the battle.”    J.A. 643.    A Penguin

7 executive wrote to express similar support for Macmillan’s position.  

8 The district court found that while Amazon was “opposed to adoption of

9 the agency model and did not want to cede pricing authority to the Publishers,”

10 it knew that it could not prevail in this position against five of the Big Six.  Apple,

11 952 F. Supp. 2d at 671, 680.    When Amazon told Macmillan that it would be

12 willing to negotiate agency terms, Sargent sent Cue an email titled “URGENT!!”

13 that read: “Hi Eddy, I am gonna need to figure out our final agency terms of sale

14 tonight.  Can you call me please?”  J.A. 642.  Cue and Sargent spoke that night

15 and, while Cue denied at trial that the conversation concerned Macmillan’s

16 negotiations with Amazon, the district court found that “his denial was not

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credible.”11 1     Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 681 n.52.    By February 5, Amazon had

2 agreed to agency terms with Macmillan.

3 The other publishers who had joined the iBookstore quickly followed

4 Macmillan’s lead.  On February 11, Reidy wrote to the head of CBS that Simon &

5 Schuster was beginning agency negotiations with Amazon.    She informed him

6 that she was trying to “delay” negotiations because it was “imperative . . . that

7 the other publishers with whom Apple has announced deals push for resolution

8 on their term changes” at the same time, “thus not leaving us out there alone.”  

9 J.A. 701.    Each of the Publisher Defendants then informed Amazon that they

10 were under tight deadlines to negotiate new agency agreements, and kept one

11 another informed about the details of their negotiations.  As David Naggar, one

12 of Amazon’s negotiators, testified, whenever Amazon “would make a concession

13 on an important deal point,” it would “come back to us from another publisher

14 asking for the same thing or proposing similar language.”  J.A. 1491.

15 Once again, Apple closely monitored the negotiations with Amazon.  The

16 Publisher Defendants would inform Cue when they had completed agency

17 agreements, and his team monitored price changes on the Kindle.    When

                                               11 As the district court noted, Macmillan had executed its Contract with Apple a

week earlier, so that “the only final agency terms still under discussion were with

Amazon.”  Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 681 n.52.

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1 Penguin languished behind the others, Cue informed Jobs that Apple was

2 “changing a bunch of Penguin titles to 9.99” in the iBookstore “because they

3 didn’t get their Amazon deal done.”    Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 682 (internal

4 quotation marks omitted).  By March 2010, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette,

5 and Simon & Schuster had completed agency agreements with Amazon.  When

6 Penguin completed its deal in June, the company’s executive proudly announced

7 to Cue that “[t]he playing field is now level.”    Id. (internal quotation marks

omitted).12 8

9 F. Effect on Ebook Prices

10 As Apple and the Publisher Defendants expected, the iBookstore price

11 caps quickly became the benchmark for ebook versions of new releases and New

12 York Times bestsellers.  In the five months following the launch of the iBookstore,

13 the publishers who joined the marketplace and switched Amazon to an agency

14 model priced 85.7% of new releases on Kindle and 92.1% of new releases on the

15 iBookstore at, or just below, the price caps.  Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 682.  Prices

16 for New York Times bestsellers took a similar leap as publishers began to sell

                                              

12 Eventually, the Publisher Defendants negotiated agency agreements with

Barnes & Noble, and later Google.  Random House also adopted the agency model, and

joined the iBookstore, in early 2011.

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41

1 96.8% of their bestsellers on Kindle and 99.4% of their bestsellers on the

2 iBookstore at, or just below, the Apple price caps.   Id.   During that same time

3 period, Random House, which had not switched to an agency model, saw

4 virtually no change in the prices for its new releases or New York Times

5 bestsellers.

6 The Apple price caps also had a ripple effect on the rest of the Publisher

7 Defendants’ catalogues.    Recognizing that Apple’s price caps were tied to the

8 price of hardcover books, many of these publishers increased the prices of their

9 newly released hardcover books to shift the ebook version into a higher price

10 category.    Id. at 683.    Furthermore, because the Publisher Defendants who

11 switched to the agency model expected to make less money per sale than under

12 the wholesale model, they also increased the prices on their ebooks that were not

new releases or bestsellers to make up for the expected loss of revenue.13 13   Based

14 on data from February 2010 — just before the Publisher Defendants switched

15 Amazon to agency pricing — to February 2011, an expert retained by the Justice

16 Department observed that the weighted average price of the Publisher

17 Defendants’ new releases increased by 24.2%, while bestsellers increased by

                                               13 The five Publisher Defendants accounted for 48.8% of all retail trade ebook

sales in the United States during the first quarter of 2010.

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42

1 40.4%, and other ebooks increased by 27.5%, for a total weighted average ebook

price increase of 23.9%.14 2   Indeed, even Apple’s expert agreed, noting that, over a

3 two‐year period, the Publisher Defendants increased their average prices for

4 hardcovers, new releases, and other ebooks.

5 Increasing prices reduced demand for the Publisher Defendants’ ebooks.  

6 According to one of Plaintiffs’ experts, the publishers who switched to agency

7 sold 77,307 fewer ebooks over a two‐week period after the switch to agency than

8 in a comparable two‐week period before the switch, which amounted to selling

9 12.9% fewer units.  Id. at 684.  Another expert relied on data from Random House

10 to estimate how many ebooks the Publisher Defendants who switched Amazon

11 to agency would have sold had they stayed with the wholesale model, and

12 concluded that the agency switch and price increases led to 14.5% fewer sales.  Id.

13 Significantly, these changes took place against the backdrop of a rapidly

14 changing ebook market.  Amazon introduced the Kindle in November 2007, just

15 over two years before Apple launched the iPad in January 2010.    During that

16 short period, Apple estimated that the market grew from $70 million in ebook

                                              

14 A weighted average price controls for the fact that different ebooks sell in

different quantities by dividing the total price that consumers paid for ebooks by the

total number of ebooks sold.

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1 sales in 2007 to $280 million in 2009, and the company projected those figures to

2 grow significantly in following years.    Apple’s expert witnesses argued that

3 overall ebook sales continued to grow in the two years after the creation of the

4 iBookstore and that the average ebook price fell during those years.    But as

5 Plaintiffs’ experts pointed out, the ebook market had been expanding rapidly

6 even before Apple’s entry and average prices had been falling as lower‐end

7 publishers entered the market and larger numbers of old books became available

8 in digital form.  “Apple’s experts did not present any analysis that attempted to

9 control for the many changes that the e‐book market was experiencing during

10 these early years of its growth,” Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 685, nor did they

11 estimate how the market would have grown but for Apple’s agreement with the

12 Publisher Defendants to switch to an agency model and raise prices.    To the

13 contrary, the undisputed fact that the Publisher Defendants raised prices on their

14 ebooks, which accounted for roughly 50% of the trade ebook market in the first

15 quarter of 2010, necessitated “a finding that the actions taken by Apple and the

16 Publisher Defendants led to an increase in the price of e‐books.”  Id.

17 Finally, in response to the dissent’s claim that Apple’s conduct

18 “deconcentrat[ed] . . . the e‐book retail market” and thus was “pro‐competitive,”

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1 Dissenting Op. at 31, it is worth noting that the district court’s economic analysis

2 and the parties’ submissions at trial focused entirely on the price and sales

3 figures for trade ebooks.   This is because both parties agreed that the relevant

4 market in this case is “the trade e‐books market, not the e‐reader market or the

5 ‘e‐books system’ market.”   United States v. Apple, Inc., 889 F. Supp. 2d 623, 642

6 (S.D.N.Y. 2012); Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 694 n.60.    The district court did not

7 analyze the state of competition between ebook retailers or determine that

8 Amazon’s pricing policy acted, as the dissent accuses, as a “barrier[] to entry” for

9 other potential retailers.  Dissenting Op. at 24, 30.   

10 II. Procedural History

11 On April 11, 2012, Plaintiffs filed a pair of civil antitrust actions in the

12 United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.    The

13 complaints alleged that Apple and the Publisher Defendants — Hachette,

14 HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster — conspired to raise,

15 fix, and stabilize the retail price for newly released and bestselling trade ebooks

16 in violation of § 1 of the Sherman Act and various state laws.  The litigation then

17 proceeded along two separate trajectories, one for the Publisher Defendants and

18 the other for Apple.

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1 A. Publisher Defendants

2 Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster agreed to settle with DOJ

3 by signing consent decrees on the same day that the Justice Department filed its

4 complaint.  Pursuant to the Tunney Act, 15 U.S.C. § 16 et seq., “at least 60 days

5 prior to the effective date” of a consent judgment, the United States must file a

6 “competitive impact statement,” which includes, inter alia, “the nature and

7 purpose of the proceeding,” “a description of the practices or events giving rise

8 to the alleged violation of the antitrust laws,” and an explanation of the relief

9 obtained by the consent judgment “and the anticipated effects on competition of

10 such relief.”  Id. § 16(b).  In compliance with these requirements, DOJ issued a

11 competitive impact statement that outlined the remedies it planned to impose on

12 Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster.    Two of those proposed

13 remedies required that, for two years, the three publishers “not restrict, limit, or

14 impede an E‐book Retailer’s ability to set, alter, or reduce the Retail Price of any

15 E‐book or to offer price discounts or any other form of promotions,” and that

16 they not “enter into any agreement” with retailers that limit such practices.  J.A.

17 1126‐27.

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1 After the 60‐day comment period, the Justice Department moved in the

2 district court for a decision that “the entry of the judgment is in the public

3 interest,” 15 U.S.C. § 16(e), and for approval of the consent decree.  In defense of

4 the two‐year limitations provisions, DOJ explained that the Publisher Defendants

5 had used retail price restrictions to “effectuat[e] the conspiracy” and that two

6 years was sufficient to “allow movement in the marketplace away from collusive

7 conditions” without “alter[ing] the ultimate development of the competitive

8 landscape in the still‐evolving e‐books industry.”  J.A. 1054‐55.  On September 5,

9 2012, the district court approved the consent decree and found the two‐year ban

10 on retail‐price restrictions “wholly appropriate given the Settling Defendants’

11 alleged abuse of such provisions . . . , the Government’s recognition that such

12 terms are not intrinsically unlawful, and the nascent state of competition in the e‐

13 books industry.”  J.A. 1088.

14 The remaining Publisher Defendants, Penguin and Macmillan, settled in

15 quick succession.    On December 18, 2012, Penguin agreed to a consent decree

16 with essentially the same terms that Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon &

17 Schuster received.  A few months later, in February 2013, Macmillan also agreed

18 to settle.    The terms of Macmillan’s consent decree contained slight

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47

1 modifications.  Rather than delaying the prohibition on retail discounts until the

2 court approved the decree, DOJ required Macmillan to begin compliance within

3 three days of signing the decree.  In exchange, the Justice Department agreed to

4 back‐date the beginning of the limitations period to December 18, 2012 and to

5 reduce its length from two years to 23 months, explaining that “[c]onsumers are

6 better served by bringing more immediate retail price competition to the market”

7 and that a “23‐month cooling‐off period is sufficient” to restore competition. J.A.

8 1162‐63. The district court approved Penguin’s consent decree on May 17, 2013,

9 and Macmillan’s on August 12, 2013.

10 B. Apple

11 Unlike the Publisher Defendants, Apple opted to take the case to trial.  Fact

12 and expert discovery concluded on March 22, 2013 and, after filing pretrial

13 motions, the parties agreed to a bench trial on Apple’s liability and injunctive

14 relief, to be followed by a separate trial on damages on the state claims if the

15 states prevailed.   

16 On July 10, 2013, after conducting a three‐week bench trial, the district

17 court concluded that Apple had violated § 1 of the Sherman Act and various state

18 antitrust laws.  In brief, the court found that Apple “orchestrat[ed]” a conspiracy

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1 among the Publisher Defendants to “eliminate retail price competition [in the e‐

2 book market] in order to raise the retail prices of e‐books.”  Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d

3 at 697.    Because this conspiracy consisted of a group of competitors — the

4 Publisher Defendants — assembled by Apple to increase prices, it constituted a

5 “horizontal price‐fixing conspiracy” and was a per se violation of the Sherman

6 Act.  Id. at 694.  It concluded, moreover, that even if the agreement to raise prices

7 and eliminate retail price competition were analyzed under the rule of reason, it

8 would still constitute an unreasonable restraint of trade in violation of § 1.  Id.  In

9 the district court’s view, Plaintiffs’ experts persuasively demonstrated that the

10 agreement facilitated an “across‐the board price increase in e‐books sold by the

11 Publisher Defendants” and a corresponding drop in sales.    Id.   Apple, on the

12 other hand, failed to show that “the execution of the Agreements,” as opposed to

13 the launch of the iPad and “evolution of digital publishing more generally”

14 (which were independent of the Agreements), “had any pro‐competitive effects.”  

15 Id.

16 After the district court issued its liability decision, the parties submitted

17 briefing on injunctive relief.  The court conducted a hearing on the issue and, on

18 September 5, 2013, issued a final injunctive order against Apple and entered final

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1 judgment.    The injunctive order consists of four categories of relief:  

2 (1) “Prohibited Conduct,” which prevents Apple from enforcing MFNs with

3 ebook publishers, retaliating against publishers for signing agreements with

4 other retailers, or agreeing with any of the Publisher Defendants to restrict, limit,

5 or impede Apple’s ability to set ebook retail prices; (2) “Required Conduct,”

6 which, among other things, forces Apple to modify its agency agreements with

7 the Publisher Defendants and to treat ebook apps sold in the iTunes store like

8 any other app sold there; (3) “Antitrust Compliance,” which requires Apple to

9 improve its internal system for preventing antitrust violations; and (4) “External

10 Compliance Monitor[ing],” which allows the court to appoint an external

11 monitor to ensure Apple’s compliance with the injunctive order.

12 After the entry of the district court’s injunctive order, Apple, Macmillan,

13 and Simon & Schuster filed this appeal.   The parties have not yet conducted a

14 trial to assess the damages stemming from the state antitrust claims.

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1 DISCUSSION

2 To hold a defendant liable for violating § 1 of the Sherman Act, a district

3 court must find “a combination or some form of concerted action between at

4 least two legally distinct economic entities” that “constituted an unreasonable

5 restraint of trade.”  Capital Imaging Assocs. v. Mohawk Valley Med. Assocs., 996 F.2d

6 537, 542 (2d Cir. 1993); see 15 U.S.C. § 1.  On appeal, Apple challenges numerous

7 aspects of the district court’s § 1 analysis and also contends that the injunctive

8 order that the district court imposed on the company is unlawful.   Macmillan

9 and Simon & Schuster have joined Apple’s challenge to the injunction, arguing

10 that it impermissibly interferes with their consent decrees and is barred by the

11 doctrine of judicial estoppel.    We conclude that the district court’s liability

12 determination was sound and its injunctive order lawful.  We therefore affirm the

13 judgment of the district court.

14 I.  Standard of Review

15 Following a bench trial, this Court reviews the “district court’s findings of

16 fact for clear error” and its “conclusions of law and mixed questions de novo.”  

17 Connors v. Conn. Gen. Life Ins. Co., 272 F.3d 127, 135 (2d Cir. 2001); see Fed. R. Civ.

18 P. 52(a).  The district court’s evidentiary rulings and its fashioning of equitable

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1 relief are reviewed for abuse of discretion.  See Zerega Ave. Realty Corp. v. Hornbeck

2 Offshore Transp., LLC, 571 F.3d 206, 212‐13 (2d Cir. 2009) (evidentiary rulings);

3 Abrahamson v. Bd. of Educ. Of the Wappingers Falls Cent. Sch. Dist., 374 F.3d 66, 76

4 (2d Cir. 2004) (equitable relief).

5 II.  Apple’s Liability Under § 1

6 This appeal requires us to address the important distinction between

7 “horizontal” agreements to set prices, which involve coordination “between

8 competitors at the same level of [a] market structure,” and “vertical” agreements

9 on pricing, which are created between parties “at different levels of [a] market

10 structure.”   Anderson News, L.L.C. v. Am. Media, Inc., 680 F.3d 162, 182 (2d Cir.

11 2012) (internal quotation marks omitted).    Under § 1 of the Sherman Act, the

12 former are, with limited exceptions, per se unlawful, while the latter are unlawful

13 only if an assessment of market effects, known as a rule‐of‐reason analysis,

14 reveals that they unreasonably restrain trade.  See Leegin Creative Leather Prods.,

15 Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., 551 U.S. 877, 893 (2007).

16 Although this distinction is sharp in theory, determining the orientation of

17 an agreement can be difficult as a matter of fact and turns on more than simply

18 identifying whether the participants are at the same level of the market structure.  

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1 For instance, courts have long recognized the existence of “hub‐and‐spoke”

2 conspiracies in which an entity at one level of the market structure, the “hub,”

3 coordinates an agreement among competitors at a different level, the “spokes.”  

4 Howard Hess Dental Labs. Inc. v. Dentsply Int’l, Inc., 602 F.3d 237, 255 (3d Cir. 2010);

5 see also Toys “R” Us, Inc. v. FTC, 221 F.3d 928, 932‐34 (7th Cir. 2000).    These

6 arrangements consist of both vertical agreements between the hub and each

7 spoke and a horizontal agreement among the spokes “to adhere to the [hub’s]

8 terms,” often because the spokes “would not have gone along with [the vertical

9 agreements] except on the understanding that the other [spokes] were agreeing

10 to the same thing.”  VI Phillip E. Areeda & Herbert Hovenkamp, Antitrust Law

11 ¶ 1402c (3d ed. 2010) (citing PepsiCo, Inc. v. Coca‐Cola Co., 315 F.3d 101 (2d Cir.

12 2002)); see also Am. Bar Ass’n, Antitrust Law Developments 24‐26 (6th ed. 2007); XII

Areeda & Hovenkamp, supra, ¶ 2004c.15 13

14 Apple characterizes its Contracts with the Publisher Defendants as a series

15 of parallel but independent vertical agreements, a characterization that forms the

16 basis for its two primary arguments against the district court’s decision.   First,

                                               15 In this sense, the “hub‐and‐spoke” metaphor is somewhat inaccurate — the

plaintiff must also prove the existence of a “rim” to the wheel in the form of an

agreement among the horizontal competitors.   See Dickson v. Microsoft Corp., 309 F.3d

193, 203‐04 (4th Cir. 2002).

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1 Apple argues that the district court impermissibly inferred its involvement in a

2 horizontal price‐fixing conspiracy from the Contracts themselves.    Because (in

3 Apple’s view) the Contracts were vertical, lawful, and in Apple’s independent

4 economic interest, the mere fact that Apple agreed to the same terms with

5 multiple publishers cannot establish that Apple consciously organized a

6 conspiracy among the Publisher Defendants to raise consumer‐facing ebook

7 prices — even if the effect of its Contracts was to raise those prices.    Second,

8 Apple argues that, even if it did orchestrate a horizontal price‐fixing conspiracy,

9 its conduct should not be subject to per se condemnation.  According to Apple,

10 proper application of the rule of reason reveals that its conduct was not unlawful.   

11 For the reasons set forth below, we reject these arguments.  On this record,

12 the district court did not err in determining that Apple orchestrated an

13 agreement with and among the Publisher Defendants, in characterizing this

14 agreement as a horizontal price fixing‐conspiracy, or in holding that the

15 conspiracy unreasonably restrained trade in violation of § 1 of the Sherman Act.   

16 A. The Conspiracy with the Publisher Defendants

17 Section 1 of the Sherman Act bans restraints on trade “effected by a

18 contract, combination, or conspiracy.”  Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 553

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1 (2007) (internal quotation marks omitted).  The first “crucial question in a Section

2 1 case is therefore whether the challenged conduct ‘stem[s] from independent

3 decision or from an agreement, tacit or express.’”    Starr v. Sony BMG Music

4 Entm’t, 592 F.3d 314, 321 (2d Cir. 2010) (alteration in original) (quoting Theatre

5 Enters., Inc. v. Paramount Film Distrib. Corp., 346 U.S. 537, 540 (1954)).

6 Identifying the existence and nature of a conspiracy requires determining

7 whether the evidence “reasonably tends to prove that the [defendant] and others

8 had a conscious commitment to a common scheme designed to achieve an

9 unlawful objective.”    Monsanto Co. v. Spray‐Rite Serv. Corp., 465 U.S. 752, 764

10 (1984) (internal quotation marks omitted).    Parallel action is not, by itself,

11 sufficient to prove the existence of a conspiracy; such behavior could be the

12 result of “coincidence, independent responses to common stimuli, or mere

13 interdependence unaided by an advance understanding among the parties.”  

14 Twombly, 550 U.S. at 556 n.4 (internal quotation marks omitted).  Indeed, parallel

15 behavior that does not result from an agreement is not unlawful even if it is

16 anticompetitive.  See In re Text Messaging Antitrust Litig., 782 F.3d 867, 873‐79 (7th

17 Cir. 2015); In re Flat Glass Antitrust Litig., 385 F.3d 350, 360‐61 (3d Cir. 2004).  

18 Accordingly, to prove an antitrust conspiracy, “a plaintiff must show the

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1 existence of additional circumstances, often referred to as ‘plus’ factors, which,

2 when viewed in conjunction with the parallel acts, can serve to allow a fact‐

3 finder to infer a conspiracy.”  Apex Oil Co. v. DiMauro, 822 F.2d 246, 253 (2d Cir.

4 1987).   

5 These additional circumstances can, of course, consist of “direct evidence

6 that the defendants entered into an agreement” like “a recorded phone call in

7 which two competitors agreed to fix prices.”  Mayor & City Council of Baltimore,

8 Md. v. Citigroup, Inc., 709 F.3d 129, 136 (2d Cir. 2013).   But plaintiffs may also

9 “present circumstantial facts supporting the inference that a conspiracy existed.”  

10 Id.  Circumstances that may raise an inference of conspiracy include “a common

11 motive to conspire, evidence that shows that the parallel acts were against the

12 apparent individual economic self‐interest of the alleged conspirators, and

13 evidence of a high level of interfirm communications.” Id. (internal quotation

14 marks omitted).  Parallel conduct alone may support an inference of conspiracy,

15 moreover, if it consists of “complex and historically unprecedented changes in

16 pricing structure made at the very same time by multiple competitors, and made

17 for no other discernible reason.”  Id. at 137 (internal quotation marks omitted).   

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1 Because of the risk of condemning parallel conduct that results from

2 independent action and not from an actual unlawful agreement, the Supreme

3 Court has cautioned against drawing an inference of conspiracy from evidence

4 that is equally consistent with independent conduct as with illegal conspiracy —

5 or, as the Court has called it, “ambiguous” evidence.  Matsushita Elec. Indus. Co. v.

6 Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U.S. 574, 597 n.21 (1986).  Thus, a finding of conspiracy

7 requires “evidence that tends to exclude the possibility” that the defendant was

8 “acting independently.”  Monsanto, 465 U.S. at 764.  This requirement, however,

9 “[does] not mean that the plaintiff must disprove all nonconspiratorial

10 explanations for the defendants’ conduct”; rather, the evidence need only be

11 sufficient “to allow a reasonable fact finder to infer that the conspiratorial

12 explanation is more likely than not.”  In re Publ’n Paper Antitrust Litig., 690 F.3d

13 51, 63 (2d Cir. 2012) (quoting Phillip E. Areeda & Herbert Hovenkamp,

14 Fundamentals of Antitrust Law § 14.03(b), at 14‐25 (4th ed. 2011)); accord Matsushita,

15 475 U.S. at 588 (requiring that “the inference of conspiracy is reasonable in light

16 of the competing inferences of independent action”); In re High Fructose Corn

17 Syrup Antitrust Litig., 295 F.3d 651, 655‐56 (7th Cir. 2002).

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1 Apple portrays its Contracts with the Publisher Defendants as, at worst,

2 “unwittingly facilitat[ing]” their joint conduct.  Apple Br. at 23.  All Apple did, it

3 claims, was attempt to enter the market on profitable terms by offering

4 contractual provisions — an agency model, the MFN Clause, and tiered price

5 caps — which ensured the company a small profit on each ebook sale and

6 insulated it from retail price competition.    This had the effect of raising prices

7 because it created an incentive for the Publisher Defendants to demand that

8 Amazon adopt an agency model and to seize control over consumer‐facing

9 ebook prices industry‐wide.  But although Apple knew that its contractual terms

10 would entice the Publisher Defendants (who wanted to do away with Amazon’s

11 $9.99 pricing) to seek control over prices from Amazon and other ebook retailers,

12 Apple’s success in capitalizing on the Publisher Defendants’ preexisting

13 incentives, it contends, does not suggest that it joined a conspiracy among the

14 Publisher Defendants to raise prices.    In sum, Apple’s basic argument is that

15 because its Contracts with the Publisher Defendants were fully consistent with its

16 independent business interests, those agreements provide only “ambiguous”

17 evidence of a § 1 conspiracy, and the district court therefore erred under

18 Matsushita and Monsanto in inferring such a conspiracy.

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1 We disagree.  At the start, Apple’s benign portrayal of its Contracts with

2 the Publisher Defendants is not persuasive — not because those Contracts

3 themselves were independently unlawful, but because, in context, they provide

4 strong evidence that Apple consciously orchestrated a conspiracy among the

5 Publisher Defendants.  As explained below, and as the district court concluded,

6 Apple understood that its proposed Contracts were attractive to the Publisher

7 Defendants only if they collectively shifted their relationships with Amazon to an

8 agency model — which Apple knew would result in higher consumer‐facing

9 ebook prices.    In addition to these Contracts, moreover, ample additional

10 evidence identified by the district court established both that the Publisher

11 Defendants’ shifting to an agency model with Amazon was the result of express

12 collusion among them and that Apple consciously played a key role in

13 organizing that collusion.  The district court did not err in concluding that Apple

14 was more than an innocent bystander.

15 Apple offered each Big Six publisher a proposed Contract that would be

16 attractive only if the publishers acted collectively.    Under Apple’s proposed

17 agency model, the publishers stood to make less money per sale than under their

18 wholesale agreements with Amazon, but the Publisher Defendants were willing

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1 to stomach this loss because the model allowed them to sell new releases and

2 bestsellers for more than $9.99.  Because of the MFN Clause, however, each new

3 release and bestseller sold in the iBookstore would cost only $9.99 as long as

4 Amazon continued to sell ebooks at that price.    So in order to receive the

5 perceived benefit of Apple’s proposed Contracts, the Publisher Defendants had

6 to switch Amazon to an agency model as well — something no individual

7 publisher had sufficient leverage to do on its own.    Thus, each Publisher

8 Defendant would be able to accomplish the shift to agency — and therefore have

9 an incentive to sign Apple’s proposed Contracts — only if it acted in tandem with

10 its competitors.  See Starr, 592 F.3d at 324; Flat Glass, 385 F.3d at 360‐61; see also

11 J.A. 1974 (noting that the agreements would “not fix the publishers’ problems” if

12 they could not move Amazon to an agency model).  By the very act of signing a

13 Contract with Apple containing an MFN Clause, then, each of the Publisher

14 Defendants signaled a clear commitment to move against Amazon, thereby

15 facilitating their collective action.    As the district court explained, the MFNs

16 “stiffened the spines” of the Publisher Defendants.  Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 665.

17 As a sophisticated negotiator, Apple was fully aware that its proposed

18 Contracts would entice a critical mass of publishers only if these publishers

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perceived an opportunity collectively to shift Amazon to agency.16 1   In fact, this

2 was the very purpose of the MFN, which Apple’s Saul devised as an elegant

3 alternative to a provision that would have explicitly required the publishers to

4 adopt an agency model with other retailers.  As Cue put it, the MFN “force[d] the

5 model” from wholesale to agency.    J.A. 865.    Indeed, the MFN’s capacity for

6 forcing collective action by the publishers was precisely what enabled Jobs to

7 predict with confidence that “the price will be the same” on the iBookstore and

8 the Kindle when he announced the launch of the iPad — the same, Jobs said,

9 because the publishers would make Amazon “sign . . . agency contract[s]” by

10 threatening to withhold their ebooks.  J.A. 891.  Apple was also fully aware that

11 once the Publisher Defendants seized control over consumer‐facing ebook prices,

12 those prices would rise.    It knew from the outset that the publishers hated

13 Amazon’s $9.99 price point, and it put price caps in its agreements because it

14 specifically anticipated that once the publishers gained control over prices, they

                                               16 Apple’s argument on appeal that it did not have sufficient market power to

coordinate the Publisher Defendants is beside the point.  Market power may afford one

means by which a company can coerce others to comply with its wishes, but brute force

is not the only way to foster an agreement.    Here, both Apple and the Publisher

Defendants understood that Apple was in a position to “solve” the publishers’

“Amazon problem” by helping them eliminate what they saw as a mortal threat to their

businesses — namely, the $9.99 price point.

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1 would push them higher than $9.99, higher than Apple itself deemed “realistic.”  

2 Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 692 (internal quotation marks omitted).   

3 On appeal, Apple nonetheless defends the Contracts that it proposed to the

4 publishers as an “aikido move” that shrewdly leveraged market conditions to its

5 own advantage.  Apple Br. at 17.  “[A]ikido move” or not, the attractiveness of

6 Apple’s offer to the Publisher Defendants hinged on whether it could

7 successfully help organize them to force Amazon to an agency model and then to

8 use their newfound collective control to raise ebook prices.  The Supreme Court

9 has defined an agreement for Sherman Act § 1 purposes as “a conscious

10 commitment to a common scheme designed to achieve an unlawful objective.”  

11 Monsanto, 465 U.S. at 764 (internal quotation marks omitted).  Plainly, this use of

12 the promise of higher prices as a bargaining chip to induce the Publisher

13 Defendants to participate in the iBookstore constituted a conscious commitment

14 to the goal of raising ebook prices.  “Antitrust law has never required identical

15 motives among conspirators” when their independent reasons for joining together

16 lead to collusive action.  Spectators’ Commc’n Network Inc. v. Colonial Country Club,

17 253 F.3d 215, 220 (5th Cir. 2001) (emphasis added).  Put differently, “independent

18 reasons” can also be “interdependent,” and the fact that Apple’s conduct was in

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1 its own economic interest in no way undermines the inference that it entered an

2 agreement to raise ebook prices.    VI Areeda & Hovenkamp, supra, ¶ 1413a

3 (internal quotation marks omitted).   

4 Nor was the Publisher Defendants’ joint action against Amazon a result of

5 parallel decisionmaking.   As we have explained, conduct resulting solely from

6 competitors’ independent business decisions — and not from any “agreement”

7 — is not unlawful under § 1 of the Sherman Act, even if it is anticompetitive.  See

8 Text Messaging, 782 F.3d at 873‐79.    But to generate a permissible inference of

9 agreement, a plaintiff need only present sufficient evidence that such agreement

10 was more likely than not.  On this record, the district court had ample basis to

11 conclude that it was not equally likely that the near‐simultaneous signing of

12 Apple’s Contracts by multiple publishers — which led to all of the Publisher

13 Defendants moving against Amazon — resulted from the parties’ independent

14 decisions, as opposed to a “meeting of [the] minds.”  Monsanto, 465 U.S. at 765;

15 see Toys “R” Us, 221 F.3d at 935‐36 (holding that exclusive‐dealing agreements

16 between a retailer and manufacturers that were contrary to the manufacturers’

17 individual self‐interest but consistent with their collective interest supported the

18 inference of a horizontal conspiracy in which the retailer participated); VI Areeda

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1 & Hovenkamp, supra, ¶ 1425a, d (“[A] conspiracy may be inferred if a

2 defendant’s action would have been contrary to its self‐interest in the absence of

3 advance agreement.”    Id. ¶ 1425a).    That the Publisher Defendants were in

4 constant communication regarding their negotiations with both Apple and

5 Amazon can hardly be disputed.  Indeed, Apple never seriously argues that the

6 Publisher Defendants were not acting in concert.

7 Even so, Apple claims, it cannot have organized the conspiracy among the

8 Publisher Defendants if it merely “unwittingly facilitated [their] joint conduct.”  

9 Apple Br. at 23.   But this argument founders — and dramatically so — on the

10 factual findings of the district court.    As the district court explained, Apple’s

11 Contracts with the publishers “must be considered in the context of the entire

12 record.”  Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 699.  Even if Apple was unaware of the extent

of the Publisher Defendants’ coordination when it first approached them,17 13 its

                                               17 Apple endeavors to draw the district court’s factfinding into doubt by

asserting, erroneously, that the “bedrock of the court’s entire decision” hinges on its

supposed determination that Apple, knowing that the publishers had been coordinating

beforehand, joined a preexisting conspiracy to raise prices at its initial meetings with

the Publisher Defendants — a proposition that, it says, is unsupported by the record.  

The district court, however, did not find that Apple joined an ongoing conspiracy in late

2009, but merely observed that Apple went into its initial meetings with the

understanding that the Publisher Defendants disliked, and were trying to fight,

Amazon’s $9.99 pricing, and so would be receptive to the news that Apple was open to

higher prices.  See Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 703.  These findings were amply supported

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1 subsequent communications with them as negotiations progressed show that

2 Apple consciously played a key role in organizing their express collusion.  From

3 the outset, Cue told the publishers that Apple would launch its iBookstore only if

4 a sufficient number of them agreed to participate and that each publisher would

5 receive identical terms, assuring them that a critical mass of major publishers

6 would be prepared to move against Amazon.  Later on, Cue and his team kept

7 the publishers updated about how many of their peers signed Apple’s Contracts,

8 and reminded them that it was offering “the best chance for publishers to

9 challenge the 9.99 price point” before it became “cement[ed]” in “consumer

10 expectations.”   J.A. 522.   When time ran short, Apple coordinated phone calls

between the publishers who had agreed and those who remained on the fence.18 11   

                                                                                                                                                  

and help explain how the agreement among Apple and the Publisher Defendants

thereafter emerged.

18 Apple takes issue with the district court’s conclusion that Apple was aware of,

and facilitated, communication between the Publisher Defendants.    But the district

court found that Cue believed Reidy was a “leader” in the publishing industry and that,

on at least two occasions toward the end of the negotiating period, Cue called a

recalcitrant executive, who then spoke to Reidy before agreeing to Apple’s terms.  See

Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 659‐60; J.A. 2019‐20.  Reidy herself adverted to Cue’s role in

“herding us cats.”    J.A. 543.    Moreover, the publishing executives frequently denied

having any conversations about Apple during this period, despite strong documentary

and phone record evidence to the contrary.  The district court found that these denials

lacked credibility and “strongly support[ed] a finding of consciousness of guilt.”  Apple,

952 F. Supp. 2d at 693 n.59.  This view of the facts is not clearly erroneous.

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1 As Cue said at trial, Apple endeavored to “assure [the publishers] that they

2 weren’t going to be alone, so that [Apple] would take the fear awa[y] of the

3 Amazon retribution that they were all afraid of.”  J.A. 2068.   

4 Apple’s involvement in the conspiracy continued even past the signing of

5 its agency agreements.  Before Sargent flew to Seattle to meet with Amazon, he

6 told Cue.  Apple stayed abreast of the Publisher Defendants’ progress as they set

7 coordinated deadlines with Amazon and shared information with one another

8 during negotiations.    Apple’s communications with the Publisher Defendants

9 thus went well beyond legitimately “exchang[ing] information” within “the

10 normal course of business,” Monsanto, 465 U.S. at 762‐63 (internal quotation

11 marks omitted), or “friendly banter among business partners,” Apple Br. at 38;

12 see Monsanto, 465 U.S. at 765‐66 (concluding that message about getting “the

13 market place in order” could lead to inference of conspiracy (internal quotation

14 marks omitted)); see also Starr, 592 F.3d at 324; Apex Oil, 822 F.2d at 255‐57.

15 Apple responds to this evidence — which the experienced judge who

16 oversaw the trial characterized repeatedly as “overwhelming” — by explaining

17 how each piece of evidence standing alone is “ambiguous” and therefore

18 insufficient to support an inference of conspiracy.    We are not persuaded.    In

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1 antitrust cases, “[t]he character and effect of a conspiracy are not to be judged by

2 dismembering it and viewing its separate parts, but only by looking at it as a

3 whole.”  Cont’l Ore Co. v. Union Carbide & Carbon Corp., 370 U.S. 690, 699 (1962).  

4 Combined with the unmistakable purpose of the Contracts that Apple proposed

5 to the publishers, and with the collective move against Amazon that inevitably

6 followed the signing of those Contracts, the emails and phone records

7 demonstrate that Apple agreed with the Publisher Defendants, within the

8 meaning of the Sherman Act, to raise consumer‐facing ebook prices by

9 eliminating retail price competition.    The district court did not err in rejecting

10 Apple’s argument that the evidence of its orchestration of the Publisher

11 Defendants’ conspiracy was “ambiguous.”   

12 Given the record and the district court’s factual findings, we do not share

13 Apple and its amici’s concern that we will stifle productive enterprise by

14 inferring an agreement among Apple and the Publisher Defendants on the basis

15 of otherwise lawful contract terms, such as an agency model and MFNs.    To

16 begin with, it is well established that vertical agreements, lawful in the abstract,

17 can in context “be useful evidence for a plaintiff attempting to prove the

18 existence of a horizontal cartel,” Leegin, 551 U.S. at 893, particularly where

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1 multiple competitors sign vertical agreements that would be against their own

2 interests were they acting independently, see, e.g., Interstate Circuit v. United

3 States, 306 U.S. 208, 222 (1939); Toys “R” Us, 221 F.3d at 935‐36.   The MFNs in

4 Apple’s Contracts created a set of economic incentives pursuant to which the

5 Contracts were only attractive to the Publisher Defendants to the extent they

6 acted collectively.    That these contract terms had such an effect under the

7 particular circumstances of this case — and therefore furnish part of the evidence

8 of Apple’s agreement with the Publisher Defendants — says nothing about their

9 broader legality.  It should be self‐evident that our analysis is informed by the

10 particular context in which Apple’s contract terms were deployed.  In any event,

11 we are breaking no new ground in concluding that MFNs, though surely proper

12 in many contexts, can be “misused to anticompetitive ends in some cases.”  Blue

13 Cross & Blue Shield United of Wis. v. Marshfield Clinic, 65 F.3d 1406, 1415 (7th Cir.

14 1995); see Starr, 592 F.3d at 324 (finding MFN evidence of conspiracy).  Under the

15 right circumstances, an MFN can “facilitate anticompetitive horizontal

16 coordination” by “reduc[ing] [a company’s] incentive to deviate from a

17 coordinated horizontal arrangement.”  Jonathan B. Baker, Vertical Restraints with

18 Horizontal Consequences: Competitive Effects of “Most‐Favored‐Customer” Clauses, 64

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1 Antitrust L.J. 517, 520‐21 (1996); see also Jonathan B. Baker & Judith A. Chevalier,

2 The Competitive Consequences of Most‐Favored‐Nation Provisions, Antitrust, Spring

3 2013, at 20‐26, available at http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.

edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1280&context=facsch_lawrev.19 4

5 In short, we have no difficulty on this record rejecting Apple’s argument

6 that the district court erred in concluding that Apple “conspir[ed] with the

7 Publisher Defendants to eliminate retail price competition and to raise e‐book

8 prices.”  Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 691.  Having concluded that the district court

9 correctly identified an agreement between Apple and the Publisher Defendants

10 to raise consumer‐facing ebook prices, we turn to Apple’s and the dissent’s

11 arguments that this agreement did not violate § 1 of the Sherman Act.  

                                               19 Nor does our holding remotely suggest that price caps are always unlawful,

which they are not.    See State Oil Co. v. Khan, 522 U.S. 3 (1997) (holding that vertical

maximum price‐fixing agreements should be analyzed under the rule of reason).  Apple

required price caps because it knew that once the Publisher Defendants moved on

Amazon to seize control over ebook prices, they would raise them.  Apple wanted to

ensure that the Publisher Defendants set “realistic prices” that reflected the lower costs

of producing ebooks.  J.A. 359.  The Publisher Defendants and Apple understood that

these caps would become the “standard across the industry.”    J.A. 573.    The price

negotiations therefore reflected a common understanding that prices would rise, but a

difference of opinion among the co‐conspirators over how high they could reasonably

go.  See United States v. Andreas, 216 F.3d 645, 680 (7th Cir. 2000) (“The need to negotiate

some details of the conspiracy with the cartel members . . . does not strip a defendant of

the organizer role.”).

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1 B. Unreasonable Restraint of Trade

2 “Although the Sherman Act, by its terms, prohibits every agreement ‘in

3 restraint of trade,’ [the Supreme] Court has long recognized that Congress

4 intended to outlaw only unreasonable restraints.”  State Oil Co. v. Khan, 522 U.S.

5 3, 10 (1997).  Thus, to succeed on an antitrust claim, a plaintiff must prove that

6 the common scheme designed by the conspirators “constituted an unreasonable

7 restraint of trade either per se or under the rule of reason.”  Capital Imaging, 996

8 F.2d at 542.   

9 In antitrust cases, “[p]er se and rule‐of‐reason analysis are . . . two methods

10 of determining whether a restraint is ‘unreasonable,’ i.e., whether its

11 anticompetitive effects outweigh its procompetitive effects.”  Atl. Richfield Co. v.

12 USA Petroleum Co., 495 U.S. 328, 342 (1990).    Because this balancing typically

13 requires case‐by‐case analysis, “most antitrust claims are analyzed under [the]

14 ‘rule of reason,’ according to which the finder of fact must decide whether the

15 questioned practice imposes an unreasonable restraint on competition.”   Khan,

16 522 U.S. at 10; see also Gatt Commc’ns, Inc. v. PMC Assocs., L.L.C., 711 F.3d 68, 75

17 n.8 (2d Cir. 2013).    However, some restraints “have such predictable and

18 pernicious anticompetitive effect, and such limited potential for procompetitive

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1 benefit, that they are deemed unlawful per se.”  Khan, 522 U.S. at 10.  This rule

2 “reflect[s] a longstanding judgment” that case‐by‐case analysis is unnecessary for

3 certain practices that, “by their nature[,] have a substantial potential” to

4 unreasonably restrain competition.  FTC v. Sup. Ct. Trial Lawyers Ass’n, 493 U.S.

5 411, 433 (1990) (internal quotation marks omitted).   

6 Horizontal price‐fixing conspiracies traditionally have been, and remain,

7 the “archetypal example” of a per se unlawful restraint on trade.  Catalano, Inc. v.

8 Target Sales, Inc., 446 U.S. 643, 647 (1980).    By contrast, the Supreme Court in

9 recent years has clarified that vertical restraints — including those that restrict

10 prices — should generally be subject to the rule of reason.  See Leegin, 551 U.S. at

11 882 (holding that the rule of reason applies to vertical minimum price‐fixing);

12 Khan, 522 U.S. at 7 (holding that the rule of reason applies to vertical maximum

13 price‐fixing).  

14 In this case, the district court held that the agreement between Apple and

15 the Publisher Defendants was unlawful under the per se rule; in the alternative,

16 even assuming that a rule‐of‐reason analysis was required, the district court

17 concluded that the agreement was still unlawful.  See Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at

18 694.  On appeal, we consider three primary arguments against application of the

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1 per se rule.  First, Apple and our dissenting colleague argue that the per se rule is

2 inappropriate in this case because Apple’s Contracts with the Publisher

3 Defendants were vertical, not horizontal.  Even if the challenged agreement here

4 was horizontal, Apple argues next, it promoted “enterprise and productivity.”  

5 Finally, Apple contends that even if the agreement was horizontal, it was not, in

6 fact, a “price‐fixing” conspiracy of the kind that deserves per se condemnation.  

7 We address, and reject, these arguments in turn.    Because the ebook industry,

8 however, is new and at least arguably involves some new ways of doing

9 business, I also consider, writing only for myself, Apple’s rule‐of reason

10 argument.

11 1. Whether the Per Se Rule Applies

12 a. Horizontal Agreement

13 In light of our conclusion that the district court did not err in determining

14 that Apple organized a price‐fixing conspiracy among the Publisher Defendants,

15 Apple and the dissent’s initial argument against the per se rule — that Apple’s

16 conduct must be subject to rule‐of‐reason analysis because it involved merely

17 multiple independent, vertical agreements with the Publisher Defendants —

18 cannot succeed.   

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1 “The true test of legality” under § 1 of the Sherman Act “is whether the

2 restraint imposed is such as merely regulates and perhaps thereby promotes

3 competition or whether it is such as may suppress or even destroy competition.”  

4 Bd. of Trade of City of Chi. v. United States, 246 U.S. 231, 238 (1918) (emphasis

5 added).   By agreeing to orchestrate a horizontal price‐fixing conspiracy, Apple

6 committed itself to “achiev[ing] [that] unlawful objective,” Monsanto, 465 U.S. at

7 764 (internal quotation marks omitted): namely, collusion with and among the

8 Publisher Defendants to set ebook prices.  This type of agreement, moreover, is a

9 restraint “that would always or almost always tend to restrict competition and

10 decrease output.”  Leegin, 551 U.S. at 886 (internal quotation marks omitted).

11 The response, raised by Apple and our dissenting colleague, that Apple

12 engaged in “vertical conduct” that is unfit for per se condemnation therefore

13 misconstrues the Sherman Act analysis.  It is the type of restraint Apple agreed to

14 impose that determines whether the per se rule or the rule of reason is

15 appropriate.    These rules are means of evaluating “whether [a] restraint is

16 unreasonable,” not the reasonableness of a particular defendant’s role in the

17 scheme.  Atl. Richfield, 495 U.S. at 342 (emphasis added) (internal quotation marks

18 omitted); see also Nat’l Collegiate Athletic Ass’n v. Bd. of Regents of the Univ. of Okla.,

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1 468 U.S. 85, 103 (1984) (“Both per se rules and the Rule of Reason are employed

2 to form a judgment about the competitive significance of the restraint.” (internal

3 quotation marks omitted)).

4 Consistent with this principle, the Supreme Court and our Sister Circuits

5 have held all participants in “hub‐and‐spoke” conspiracies liable when the

6 objective of the conspiracy was a per se unreasonable restraint of trade.    See

7 Richard A. Posner, The Next Step in the Antitrust Treatment of Restricted

8 Distribution: Per Se Legality, 48 U. Chi. L. Rev. 6, 22 (1981) (“[C]ases in which

9 dealers or distributors collude . . . among themselves and bring in the

10 manufacturer to enforce their cartel, . . . can be dealt with under the conventional

11 rules applicable to horizontal price‐fixing conspiracies.).    In Klor’s, Inc. v.

12 Broadway‐Hale Stores, Inc., for example, the Supreme Court considered whether a

13 prominent retailer of electronic appliances could be held liable under § 1 of the

14 Sherman Act for fostering an agreement with and among its distributors to have

15 those companies boycott a competing retailer.    359 U.S. 207 (1959).   The Court

16 characterized this arrangement as a “[g]roup boycott[]” supported by a “wide

17 combination consisting of manufacturers, distributors and a retailer.”  Id. at 212‐

18 13.    It then decided that, if the combination were proved at trial, holding the

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1 retailer liable would be appropriate because “[g]roup boycotts, or concerted

2 refusals by traders to deal with other traders,” are per se unreasonable restraints

3 of trade.  Id. at 212.  

4 The Supreme Court followed a similar approach in United States v. General

5 Motors Corp., 384 U.S. 127 (1966), when it considered whether § 1 prohibited a car

6 manufacturer, General Motors, from coordinating a group of dealerships to

7 prevent other dealers from selling cars at discount prices.   The majority called

8 this arrangement a “classic conspiracy in restraint of trade” and refused to

9 entertain General Motors’ request to consider the company’s reasons for creating

10 the conspiracy.  Id. at 140.  The Court explained that “[t]here can be no doubt that

11 the effect of the combination . . . here was to restrain trade and commerce within

12 the meaning of the Sherman Act” because “[e]limination, by joint collaborative

13 action, of discounters from access to the market is a per se violation of the Act.”  

14 Id. at 145; see, e.g., Toys “R” Us, 221 F.3d at 936; Denny’s Marina, Inc. v. Renfro

15 Prods., Inc., 8 F.3d 1217, 1220‐21 (7th Cir. 1993); United States v. MMR Corp. (LA),

16 907 F.2d 489, 498 (5th Cir. 1990); see also Albert Foer & Randy Stutz, Private

17 Enforcement of Antitrust Law in the United States 29 (2012).

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1 Because the reasonableness of a restraint turns on its anticompetitive

2 effects, and not the identity of each actor who participates in imposing it, Apple

3 and the dissent’s observation that the Supreme Court has refused to apply the per

4 se rule to certain vertical agreements is inapposite.    The rule of reason is

5 unquestionably appropriate to analyze an agreement between a manufacturer

6 and its distributors to, for instance, limit the price at which the distributors sell

7 the manufacturer’s goods or the locations at which they sell them.  See Leegin, 551

8 U.S. at 881; Cont’l T.V., Inc. v. GTE Sylvania Inc., 433 U.S. 36, 57 (1977).    These

9 vertical restrictions “are widely used in our free market economy,” can enhance

10 interbrand competition, and do not inevitably have a “pernicious effect on

11 competition.”   Cont’l T.V., 433 U.S. at 57‐58 (internal quotation marks omitted).  

12 But the relevant “agreement in restraint of trade” in this case is not Apple’s

13 vertical Contracts with the Publisher Defendants (which might well, if

14 challenged, have to be evaluated under the rule of reason); it is the horizontal

15 agreement that Apple organized among the Publisher Defendants to raise ebook

16 prices.  As explained below, horizontal agreements with the purpose and effect

17 of raising prices are per se unreasonable because they pose a “threat to the central

18 nervous system of the economy,” United States v. Socony‐Vacuum Oil Co., 310 U.S.

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1 150, 224 n.59 (1940); that threat is just as significant when a vertical market

2 participant organizes the conspiracy.  Indeed, as the dissent notes, the Publisher

3 Defendants’ coordination to fix prices is uncontested on appeal.  See Dissenting

4 Op. at 23.  The competitive effects of that same restraint are no different merely

5 because a different conspirator is the defendant.

6 Accordingly, when the Supreme Court has applied the rule of reason to

7 vertical agreements, it has explicitly distinguished situations in which a vertical

8 player organizes a horizontal cartel.  For instance, in Business Electronics Corp. v.

9 Sharp Electronics Corp., the Court concluded that an agreement “between a

10 manufacturer and a dealer to terminate” another dealer is a ”vertical nonprice

11 restraint” that should be evaluated under the rule of reason.  485 U.S. 717, 726

12 (1988).   The Court distinguished General Motors and Klor’s on the grounds that

13 “both cases involved horizontal combinations,” id. at 734, and noted that “a

14 facially vertical restraint imposed by a manufacturer only because it has been

15 coerced by a ‘horizontal carte[l]’ . . . is in reality a horizontal restraint,” id. at 730

16 n.4 (alteration in original).   More recently, in NYNEX Corp. v. Discon, Inc., the

17 Court ruled that “a buyer’s decision to buy from one seller rather than another”

18 is subject to analysis under the rule of reason.    525 U.S. 128, 130 (1998).    In

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1 arriving at this conclusion, the Court took care to distinguish, rather than

2 overturn, Klor’s, noting that per se liability was appropriate for the organizer of

3 the conspiracy in that case because the agreement at issue was not “simply a

4 ‘vertical’ agreement between supplier and customer, but [also] a ‘horizontal’

5 agreement among competitors.”   Id. at 136 (citing Bus. Elecs. Corp., 485 U.S. at

6 734).

7 The Court’s decision in Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., is

8 no different.  551 U.S. 877 (2007).  In Leegin, a leather manufacturer entered into

9 separate agreements with each of its retailers, which required them to sell its

10 goods at certain prices.  The plaintiff — a retailer who refused to comply with the

11 requirement — argued that these resale price maintenance agreements

12 constituted per se violations of the Sherman Act.  The Supreme Court disagreed,

13 concluding that “vertical price restraints are to be judged by the rule of reason.”  

14 Id. at 882.  Its analysis was careful to distinguish between vertical restraints and

15 horizontal ones.  Vertical price restraints are unfit for the per se rule because they

16 can be used to encourage retailers to invest in promoting a product by ensuring

17 that other retailers will not undercut their prices for that good.  See id. at 890‐92.  

18 However, vertical price restraints can also be used to organize horizontal cartels

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1 to increase prices, which are, “and ought to be, per se unlawful.”    Id. at 893.  

2 When used for such a purpose, the vertical agreement may be “useful evidence

3 . . . to prove the existence of a horizontal cartel.”    Id.; see also VI Areeda &

4 Hovenkamp, supra, ¶ 1402c.  The Court made clear that it was addressing only

5 the lawfulness of the manufacturer’s vertical agreements and not the plaintiff’s

6 claim that the manufacturer also “participated in an unlawful horizontal cartel

7 with competing retailers.”    Id. at 907‐08; see also PSKS, Inc. v. Leegin Creative

8 Leather Prods., Inc., 615 F.3d 412 (5th Cir. 2010) (considering plaintiff’s “hub‐and‐

9 spoke” theory on remand).

10 Our dissenting colleague suggests that Leegin also “rejected per se liability

11 for hub‐and‐spokes agreements.”  Dissenting Op. at 18.  This position relies on a

12 single sentence from the opinion’s analysis of how vertical resale price restraints

13 can harm competition, which states that, if a “vertical agreement setting

14 minimum resale prices is entered upon to facilitate” a horizontal cartel, it “would

15 need to be held unlawful under the rule of reason.”  Leegin, 551 U.S. at 893.  If the

16 Supreme Court meant to overturn General Motors and Klor’s — precedents that it

17 has consistently reaffirmed — this cryptic sentence was certainly an odd way to

18 accomplish that result.  The Supreme Court “does not normally overturn, or so

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1 dramatically limit, earlier authority sub silentio.” Shalala v. Ill. Council on Long

2 Term Care, Inc., 529 U.S. 1, 18 (2000); see also, e.g., Nestor v. Pratt & Whitney, 466

3 F.3d 65, 72 n.8 (2d Cir. 2006) (“It is not within our purview to anticipate whether

4 the Supreme Court may one day overrule its existing precedent.” (quoting United

5 States v. Santiago, 268 F.3d 151, 155 n.6 (2d Cir. 2001) (internal quotation marks

6 omitted))).

7 We need not worry about the possibility that Leegin covertly changed the

8 law governing hub‐and‐spoke conspiracies, however, because the passage relied

9 upon by the dissent is entirely consistent with holding the “hub” in such a

10 conspiracy liable for the horizontal agreement that it joins.    A horizontal

11 conspiracy can use vertical agreements to facilitate coordination without the

12 other parties to those agreements knowing about, or agreeing to, the horizontal

13 conspiracy’s goals.    For example, a cartel of manufacturers could ensure

14 compliance with a scheme to fix prices by having every member “require its

15 dealers to adhere to specified resale prices.”  VIII Areeda & Hovenkamp, supra, ¶

16 1606b.  Because it may be difficult to distinguish such facilitating practices from

17 procompetitive vertical resale price agreements, the quoted passage from Leegin

18 notes that those “vertical agreement[s] . . . would need to be held unlawful under

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1 the rule of reason.”  551 U.S. at 893.  But there is no such possibility for confusion

2 in the hub‐and‐spoke context, where the vertical organizer has not only

3 committed to vertical agreements, but has also agreed to participate in the

4 horizontal conspiracy.  In that situation, the court need not consider whether the

5 vertical agreements restrained trade because all participants agreed to the

horizontal restraint, which is “and ought to be, per se unlawful.”  Id. 20 6

7 In short, the relevant “agreement in restraint of trade” in this case is the

8 price‐fixing conspiracy identified by the district court, not Apple’s vertical

9 contracts with the Publisher Defendants.    How the law might treat Apple’s

10 vertical agreements in the absence of a finding that Apple agreed to create the

                                               20 Since Leegin, the Sixth Circuit has acknowledged that plaintiffs can “establish[]

a per se violation [of the Sherman Act] under the hub and spoke theory.”  Total Benefits

Planning Agency, Inc. v. Anthem Blue Cross & Blue Shield, 552 F.3d 430, 435 n.3 (6th Cir.

2008).   To the extent that the Third Circuit decided otherwise in Toledo Mack Sales &

Serv., Inc. v. Mack Trucks, Inc., 530 F.3d 204, 225 (3d Cir. 2008), its more recent opinions

cast doubt on that decision.  In In re Insurance Brokerage Antitrust Litigation, for example,

the court noted that “hub‐and‐spoke conspiracies” have “a long history in antitrust

jurisprudence,” and cited Total Benefits for the position that “[t]he critical issue for

establishing a per se violation with the hub and spoke system is how the spokes are

connected to each other.”    618 F.3d 300, 327 (3d Cir. 2010) (internal quotation marks

omitted).  The court also acknowledged that “[t]he anticompetitive danger inherent” in

alleged horizontal collusion “is not necessarily mitigated by the fact that” a broker at a

different level of the market structure “managed the details of each bid, nor by the

likelihood that the horizontal collusion would not have occurred without the broker’s

involvement.”  Id. at 338.  The panel in Insurance Brokerage, however, had no occasion to

revisit Toledo Mack because the plaintiffs had failed to establish a horizontal agreement

— the “rim” in the hub‐and‐spokes conspiracy.  Id. at 362.

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1 horizontal restraint is irrelevant.    Instead, the question is whether the vertical

2 organizer of a horizontal conspiracy designed to raise prices has agreed to a

3 restraint that is any less anticompetitive than its co‐conspirators, and can

4 therefore escape per se liability.  We think not.  Even in light of this conclusion,

5 however, we must address two additional arguments that Apple raises against

6 application of the per se rule.

7 b. “Enterprise and Productivity”

8 Apple seeks refuge from the per se rule by invoking a line of cases in which

9 courts have permitted defendants to introduce procompetitive justifications for

10 horizontal price‐fixing arrangements that would ordinarily be condemned per se

11 if those agreements “when adopted could reasonably have been believed to

12 promote ‘enterprise and productivity.’”   Apple Br. at 50 (quoting In re Sulfuric

13 Acid Antitrust Litig., 703 F.3d 1004, 1011 (7th Cir. 2012)) (internal quotation mark

14 omitted).  The decisions falling in this line are narrow, and they do not support

15 Apple’s position.    In Broadcast Music, Inc. v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc.

16 (“BMI”), the defendants were corporations formed by copyright owners to

17 negotiate “blanket licenses” allowing licensees to perform any of the licensed

18 works for a flat fee.    441 U.S. 1, 4‐6 (1979).    Although this scheme literally

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1 amounted to “price fixing” by the defendants’ members, the Court upheld it

2 under the rule of reason because blanket licenses were the only way to eliminate

3 the “prohibitive” cost of each copyright owner’s individually negotiating

4 licenses, monitoring licensees’ use of their work, and enforcing the licenses’

5 terms.  Id. at 20‐21.  In National Collegiate Athletic Ass’n v. Board of Regents of the

6 University of Oklahoma (“NCAA”), the Court relied on BMI in applying the rule of

7 reason to (but ultimately striking down) restrictions placed by the National

8 Collegiate Athletic Association (“NCAA”) on the number of football games that

9 its members could agree with television networks to broadcast.  468 U.S. 85, 103

10 (1984).  Many of the NCAA’s restrictions on its members were “essential if the

11 product [amateur athletics] is to be available at all,” so a “fair evaluation” of the

12 broadcast restrictions’ “competitive character require[d] consideration of the

13 NCAA’s justifications for the restraints.”  Id. at 101, 103.

14 The Supreme Court has characterized these decisions as limited to

15 situations where the “restraints on competition are essential if the product is to

16 be available at all.”    Am. Needle, Inc. v. Nat’l Football League, 560 U.S. 183, 203

17 (2010) (quoting NCAA, 468 U.S. at 101) (internal quotation marks omitted).  But

18 even if read broadly, these cases, and others in this category, apply the rule of

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1 reason only when the restraint at issue was imposed in connection with some

2 kind of potentially efficient joint venture.    XI Areeda & Hovenkamp, supra,

3 ¶ 1908b; see, e.g., Sulfuric Acid, 703 F.3d at 1013 (describing joint venture formed

4 by defendants).    Put differently, a participant in a price‐fixing agreement may

5 invoke only certain, limited kinds of “enterprise and productivity” to receive the

6 rule of reason’s advantages.  As the Supreme Court has explained — including in

7 BMI itself, see 441 U.S. at 8 & n.11 — the per se rule would lose all the benefits of

8 being “per se” if conspirators could seek to justify their conduct on the basis of its

9 purported competitive benefits in every case.  Here, there was no joint venture or

10 other similar productive relationship between any of the participants in the

11 conspiracy that Apple joined.    Apple also does not claim, nor could it, that

12 creating an ebook retail market is possible only if the participating publishers

13 coordinate with one another on price.

14 c. Price‐Fixing Conspiracy

15 As noted, the Supreme Court has for nearly 100 years held that horizontal

16 collusion to raise prices is the “archetypal example” of a per se unlawful restraint

17 of trade.  Catalano, 446 U.S. at 647.  If successful, these conspiracies concentrate

18 the power to set prices among the conspirators, including the “power to control

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1 the market and to fix arbitrary and unreasonable prices.”  United States v. Trenton

2 Potteries Co., 273 U.S. 392, 397 (1927).  And even if unsuccessful or “not . . . aimed

3 at complete elimination of price competition,” the conspiracies pose a “threat to

4 the central nervous system of the economy” by creating a dangerously attractive

5 opportunity for competitors to enhance their power at the expense of others.  

6 Socony‐Vacuum Oil, 310 U.S. at 224 n.59 (1940).  Thus:

7 [P]rice‐fixing cartels are condemned per se because the conduct is

8 tempting to businessmen but very dangerous to society.    The

9 conceivable social benefits are few in principle, small in magnitude,

10 speculative in occurrence, and always premised on the existence of

11 price‐fixing power which is likely to be exercised adversely to the

12 public. . . . And even if power is usually established while any

13 defenses are not, litigation will be complicated, condemnation

14 delayed, would be price‐fixers encouraged to hope for escape, and

15 criminal punishment less justified.    Deterrence of a generally

16 pernicious practice would be weakened.

17

18 Trial Lawyers Ass’n, 493 U.S. at 434 n.16 (quoting 7 Philip Areeda, Antitrust Law

19 ¶ 1509, at 412‐13 (1986)).

20 Apple and its amici argue that the horizontal agreement among the

21 publishers was not actually a “price‐fixing” conspiracy that deserves per se

22 treatment in the first place.  But it is well established that per se condemnation is

23 not limited to agreements that literally set or restrict prices.    Instead, any

24 conspiracy “formed for the purpose and with the effect of raising, depressing,

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1 fixing, pegging, or stabilizing the price of a commodity . . . is illegal per se,” and

2 the precise “machinery employed . . . is immaterial.”  Socony‐Vacuum Oil, 310 U.S.

3 at 223; see also Catalano, 446 U.S. at 647‐48 (collecting cases); XII Areeda &

4 Hovenkamp, supra, ¶ 2022a, d.  The conspiracy among Apple and the Publisher

5 Defendants comfortably qualifies as a horizontal price‐fixing conspiracy.   

6 As we have already explained, the Publisher Defendants’ primary

7 objective in expressly colluding to shift the entire ebook industry to an agency

8 model (with Apple’s help) was to eliminate Amazon’s $9.99 pricing for new

9 releases and bestsellers, which the publishers believed threatened their short‐

10 term ability to sell hardcovers at higher prices and the long‐term consumer

11 perception of the price of a new book.  They had grown accustomed to a business

12 in which they rarely competed with one another on price and could, at least

13 partially, control the price of new releases and bestsellers by releasing hardcover

14 copies before paperbacks.    Amazon, and the ebook, upset that model, and

15 reduced prices to consumers by eliminating the need to print, store, and ship

16 physical volumes.    Its $9.99 price point for new releases and bestsellers

17 represented a small loss on a small percentage of its sales designed to encourage

18 consumers to adopt the new technology.

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1 Faced with downward pressure on prices but unconvinced that

2 withholding books from Amazon was a viable strategy, the Publisher

3 Defendants — their coordination orchestrated by Apple — combined forces to

4 grab control over price.    Collectively, the Publisher Defendants accounted for

5 48.8% of ebook sales in 2010.  J.A. 1571.  Once organized, they had sufficient clout

6 to demand control over pricing, in the form of agency agreements, from Amazon

7 and other ebook distributors.  This control over pricing facilitated their ultimate

8 goal of raising ebook prices to the price caps.   See VIII Areeda & Hovenkamp,

9 supra, ¶ 1606b (“Even when specific prices are not agreed upon, an express

10 horizontal agreement that each manufacturer will use resale price maintenance

11 or other distribution restraints should be illegal.  Its only business function is to

12 facilitate price coordination among manufacturers.”).    In other words, the

13 Publisher Defendants took by collusion what they could not win by competition.  

14 And Apple used the publishers’ frustration with Amazon’s $9.99 pricing as a

15 bargaining chip in its negotiations and structured its Contracts to coordinate

16 their push to raise prices throughout the industry.  A coordinated effort to raise

17 prices across the relevant market was present in every chapter of this story.

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1 This conspiracy to raise prices also had its intended effect.   Immediately

2 after the Publisher Defendants switched Amazon to an agency model, they

3 increased the Kindle prices of 85.7% of their new releases and 96.8% of their New

4 York Times bestsellers to within 1% of the Apple price caps.  They also increased

5 the prices of their other ebook offerings.    Within two weeks of the move to

6 agency, the weighted average price of the Publisher Defendants’ ebooks —

7 which accounted for just under half of all ebook sales in 2010 — had increased by

8 18.6%, while the prices for Random House and other publishers remained

9 relatively stable.   

10 This sudden increase in prices reduced ebook sales by the Publisher

11 Defendants and proved to be durable.  One analysis compared two‐week periods

12 before and after the Publisher Defendants took control over pricing and found

13 that they sold 12.9% fewer ebooks after the switch.  Another expert for Plaintiffs

14 conducted a regression analysis, which showed that, over a six‐month period

15 following the switch, the Publisher Defendants sold 14.5% fewer ebooks than

16 they would have had the price increases not occurred.  Nonetheless, ebook prices

17 for the Publisher Defendants over those six months, controlling for other factors,

18 remained 16.8% higher than before the switch.    And even Apple’s expert

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1 produced a chart showing that the Publisher Defendants’ prices for new releases,

2 bestsellers, and other offerings remained elevated a full two years after they took

3 control over pricing.

4 Apple points out that, in the two years following the conspiracy, prices

5 across the ebook market as a whole fell slightly and total output increased.  

6 However, when the agreement at issue involves price fixing, the Supreme Court

7 has consistently held that courts need not even conduct an extensive analysis of

8 “market power” or a “detailed market analysis” to demonstrate its

9 anticompetitive character.  FTC v. Ind. Fed’n of Dentists, 476 U.S. 447, 460 (1986);

10 see also Nat’l Soc’y of Prof’l Eng’rs v. United States, 435 U.S. 679, 692‐93 (1978).  The

11 district court’s assessment of Apple’s and the Publisher Defendants’ motives,

12 coupled with the unambiguous increase in the prices of their ebooks, was

13 sufficient to confirm that price fixing was the goal, and the result, of the

14 conspiracy.  See Cal. Dental Ass’n v. FTC, 526 U.S. 756, 779‐80 (1999).

15 Moreover, Apple’s evidence regarding long‐term growth and prices in the

16 ebook industry is not inconsistent with the conclusion that the price‐fixing

17 conspiracy succeeded in actually raising prices.    The popularization of ebooks

18 fundamentally altered the publishing industry by eliminating many of the

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1 marginal costs associated with selling books.    When Apple launched the

2 iBookstore just two years after Amazon introduced the Kindle, the ebook market

3 was already experiencing rapid growth and falling prices, and those trends were

4 expected to continue.  J.A. 1630, 1647.  The district court found that the Publisher

5 Defendants’ collective move to retake control of prices — and to eliminate

6 Amazon’s $9.99 price point for new releases and New York Times bestsellers —

7 tapped the brakes on those trends, causing prices to rise across their offerings

and slowing their sales growth relative to other publishers.21 8     No court can

9 presume to know the proper price of an ebook, but the long judicial experience

10 applying the Sherman Act has shown that “[a]ny combination which tampers

11 with price structures . . . would be directly interfering with the free play of

12 market forces.”  Socony‐Vacuum Oil, 310 U.S. at 221; see also Arizona v. Maricopa

13 Cnty. Med. Soc’y, 457 U.S. 332, 346 (1982).  By setting new, durable prices through

                                               21 Significantly, the Publisher Defendants are all major producers of new releases

and New York Times bestsellers, and they collectively increased prices in those

categories.  Those prices remained high notwithstanding the influx of new publishers

and low‐cost ebooks, to the detriment of consumers interested in that segment of the

market.  See 42nd Parallel N. v. E St. Denim Co., 286 F.3d 401, 405‐06 (7th Cir. 2002) (“The

key inquiry in a market power analysis is whether the defendant has the ability to raise

prices without losing its business.” (internal quotation marks omitted)); K.M.B.

Warehouse Distribs., Inc. v. Walker Mfg. Co., 61 F.3d 123, 128‐29 (2d Cir. 1995); cf. U.S.

Dep’t of Justice & Fed. Trade Comm’n, Horizontal Merger Guidelines § 6.1 (2010) (noting

that, “[i]n differentiated product industries, some products can be very close substitutes

. . . while other products are more distant substitutes”).

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1 collusion rather than competition, Apple and the Publisher Defendants imposed

2 their view of proper pricing, supplanting the market’s free play.  This evidence,

3 viewed in conjunction with the district court’s findings as to and analysis of the

4 conspiracy’s history and purpose, is sufficient to support the conclusion that the

5 agreement to raise ebook prices was a per se unlawful price‐fixing conspiracy.  

6 2. Rule of Reason

7 As explained above, neither Apple nor the dissent has presented any

8 particularly strong reason to think that the conspiracy we have identified should

9 be spared per se condemnation.  My concurring colleague would therefore affirm

10 the district court’s decision on that basis alone.    I, too, believe that per se

11 condemnation is appropriate in this case and view Apple’s sloganeering

12 references to “innovation” as a distraction from the straightforward nature of the

13 conspiracy proven at trial.  Nonetheless, I am mindful of Apple’s argument that

14 the nascent ebook industry has some new and unusual features and that the per

15 se rule is not fit for “business relationships where the economic impact of certain

16 practices is not immediately obvious.”  Leegin, 551 U.S. at 887 (internal quotation

17 marks omitted); accord Major League Baseball Props., Inc. v. Salvino, Inc., 542 F.3d

18 290, 316 (2d Cir. 2008) (“Per se treatment is not appropriate . . . where the

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1 economic and competitive effects of the challenged practice are unclear.”);

2 Sulfuric Acid, 703 F.3d at 1011 (“It is a bad idea to subject a novel way of doing

3 business . . . to per se treatment under antitrust law.”).  I therefore assume, for

4 the sake of argument, that it is appropriate to apply the rule of reason and to

5 analyze the competitive effects of Apple’s horizontal agreement with the

6 Publisher Defendants.

7 Notably, however, the ample evidence here concerning the purpose and

8 effects of Apple’s agreement with the Publisher Defendants affects the scope of

9 the rule‐of‐reason analysis called for in this case.  Under a prototypically robust

10 rule‐of‐reason analysis, the plaintiff must demonstrate an “actual adverse effect”

11 on competition in the relevant market before the “burden shifts to the defendants

12 to offer evidence of the pro‐competitive effects of their agreement.”    Geneva

13 Pharms. Tech. Corp. v. Barr Labs. Inc., 386 F.3d 485, 506‐07 (2d Cir. 2004) (internal

14 quotation marks omitted).   The factfinder then weighs the competing evidence

15 “to determine if the effects of the challenged restraint tend to promote or destroy

16 competition.”  Id. at 507.  But not every case that requires rule of reason analysis

17 “is a candidate for plenary market examination.”  Cal. Dental Ass’n, 526 U.S. at

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1 779.    “What is required, rather, is an enquiry meet for the case, looking to the

2 circumstances, details, and logic of a restraint.”  Id. at 781.

3 To that end, the Supreme Court has applied an abbreviated version of the

4 rule of reason — otherwise known as “quick look” review — to agreements

5 whose anticompetitive effects are easily ascertained.  See id. at 779.  This “quick

6 look” effectively relieves the plaintiff of its burden of providing a robust market

7 analysis, see id., by shifting the inquiry directly to a consideration of the

8 defendant’s procompetitive justifications.    See XI Areeda & Hovenkamp, supra,

9 ¶ 1914d (“[W]hen the restraint appears ‘on its face’ to be one that tends to . . .

10 increase price,” an abbreviated rule‐of‐reason analysis “operates to shift the

11 burden of proof rather than to cut off the inquiry, as is usually true in a per se

12 case.”).  Thus, in NCAA, the Supreme Court refrained from applying the per se

13 rule to the challenged television broadcast restrictions, but it did not require an

14 “elaborate industry analysis . . . to demonstrate [their] anticompetitive

15 character.”  468 U.S. at 109 (internal quotation marks omitted).  And in Indiana

16 Federation of Dentists, the Court did not apply the per se rule to a group boycott

17 when, in the relevant market, the economic impact was “not immediately

18 obvious,” but it nonetheless dispensed with a full analysis of the agreement’s

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1 anticompetitive character.  476 U.S. at 459; see also Major League Baseball, 542 F.3d

2 at 317; United States v. Brown Univ., 5 F.3d 658, 669 (3d Cir. 1993).

3 Here, the same evidence supporting our determination that per se

4 condemnation is the correct way to dispose of this appeal also supports at most a

5 “quick look” inquiry under the rule of reason.    Contrary to the dissent’s

6 suggestion, this approach does not somehow “taint” the rule‐of‐reason analysis.  

7 The dissent concedes that the conscious object of Apple’s signing its Contracts

8 with the Publisher Defendants was to organize a horizontal conspiracy among

9 them to raise consumer‐facing ebook prices.  See Dissenting Op. at 26 (noting that

10 “price increases” were “the expected result” of the defendants’ agreement).  It is

11 unsurprising in these circumstances that we are easily able to discern the

12 anticompetitive effects of that horizontal conspiracy.    A quick‐look approach

13 operates only to shift the rule‐of‐reason analysis directly to Apple’s

14 procompetitive justifications for organizing the conspiracy; I do not give those

15 defenses any shorter shrift than I otherwise would under a more robust analysis.  

16 My rejection of Apple’s defenses thus has nothing to do with my application of

17 the quick‐look approach and everything to do with how unpersuasive those

18 defenses are.      

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1 a.  Market Entry

2 Apple’s initial argument that its agreement with the Publisher Defendants

3 was procompetitive (an argument presented principally in an amicus brief

4 adopted wholeheartedly by the dissent) is that by eliminating Amazon’s $9.99

5 price point, the agreement enabled Apple and other ebook retailers to enter the

6 market and challenge Amazon’s dominance.    But this defense — that higher

7 prices enable more competitors to enter a market — is no justification for a

8 horizontal price‐fixing conspiracy.    As the Supreme Court has cogently

9 explained:

10 [I]n any case in which competitors are able to increase the price level

11 or to curtail production by agreement, it could be argued that the

12 agreement has the effect of making the market more attractive to

13 potential new entrants.    If that potential justifies horizontal

14 agreements among competitors imposing one kind of voluntary

15 restraint or another on their competitive freedom, it would seem to

16 follow that the more successful an agreement is in raising the price

17 level, the safer it is from antitrust attack.    Nothing could be more

18 inconsistent with our cases.

19

20 Catalano, 446 U.S. at 649.   

21 Nor does this argument become stronger when it is asserted, as here, that a

22 horizontal cartel at one level of the market promoted market entry at another,

23 enhancing competition.  My dissenting colleague’s view that “deconcentrating,”

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1 Dissenting Op. at 27, Amazon’s share of retail ebook sales justifies concentrating

2 power over pricing in the hands of the Publisher Defendants reflects a basic

3 misunderstanding of the nature of the competition that antitrust law protects.  

4 New entrants to a market are desirable to the extent that consumers would

5 choose to buy their products at the price offered.  When a market is concentrated

6 and an incumbent firm is charging supracompetitive prices, a new entrant can

7 benefit consumers by undercutting the incumbent’s prices, thus offering better

8 value for the same goods.  Dominant firms who want to deter competition — so

9 that they can keep charging supracompetitive prices — may erect barriers to

10 entry to keep these new competitors out, and the dissent is quite right that these

11 barriers are generally undesirable.

12 Market dominance may, however, arise “as a consequence of a superior

13 product, business acumen, or historic accident,” and is “not only not unlawful; it

14 is an important element of the free market system.”    Trinko, 540 U.S. at 407

15 (internal quotation marks omitted).  The ability to provide goods at particularly

16 low prices is one way that a firm can gain such an edge in the marketplace.  

17 Competitors are, of course, entitled to challenge dominant firms by offering,

18 among other things, superior products and lower prices.    But success is not

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1 guaranteed.  A dominant firm charging low prices may have proven itself more

2 efficient than its competitors, such that a potential new entrant’s inability to earn

3 a profit would result not from any artificial “barriers to entry,” but rather from

4 the fact that, in light of the value proposition offered by the dominant firm,

5 consumers would not choose to buy the new entrant’s products at the price it is

6 willing and able to offer.    See Einer Elhauge, United States Antitrust Law and

7 Economics 2 (2d ed. 2011) (“If a firm makes a better mousetrap, and the world

8 beats a path to its door, it may drive out all rivals and establish a monopoly; but

9 that is a good result, not a bad one.”).

10 From this perspective, the dissent’s contention that Apple could not have

11 entered the ebook retail market without the price‐fixing conspiracy, because it

12 could not have profited either by charging more than Amazon or by following

13 Amazon’s pricing, is a complete non sequitur.  The posited dilemma is the whole

14 point of competition: if Apple could not turn a profit by selling new releases and

15 bestsellers at $9.99, or if it could not make the iBookstore and iPad so attractive

16 that consumers would pay more than $9.99 to buy and read those ebooks on its

17 platform, then there was no place for its platform in the ebook retail market.  

18 Neither the district court nor Plaintiffs had an obligation to identify a “viable

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1 alternative” for Apple’s profitable entry because Apple had no entitlement to

2 enter the market on its preferred terms.  Dissenting Op. at 35.   

3 Although low prices that deter new entry may simply reflect the dominant

4 firm’s efficiency, it is true that below‐cost pricing can, under certain

5 circumstances, be anticompetitive.  The dissent suggests that Amazon’s pricing

6 gave it an unfair advantage, so that even if Apple had priced ebooks at an

7 efficient level (whatever that might have been), it still would not have been able

8 to enter the market on a profitable basis.    But Amazon was taking a risk by

9 engaging in loss‐leader pricing, losing money on some sales in order to

10 encourage readers to adopt the Kindle.    “That below‐cost pricing may impose

11 painful losses on its target is of no moment to the antitrust laws if competition is

12 not injured: It is axiomatic that the antitrust laws were passed for ‘the protection

13 of competition, not competitors.’”   Brooke Grp. Ltd. v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco

14 Corp., 509 U.S. 209, 224 (1993) (quoting Brown Shoe Co. v. United States, 370 U.S.

15 294, 320 (1962)).  Because lower prices improve consumer welfare (all else being

16 equal), below‐cost pricing is unlawfully anticompetitive only if there is a

17 “dangerous probability” that the firm engaging in it will later recoup its losses by

18 raising prices to monopoly levels after driving its rivals out of the market.  Id.  If

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1 Apple and the Publisher Defendants thought that Amazon’s conduct was truly

2 anticompetitive under this standard, they could have sued under § 2 of the

3 Sherman Act.  (Whether DOJ would have pursued its own enforcement action is

4 of unclear relevance given the availability of a private remedy.)    Failing that,

5 Amazon’s pricing was part of the competitive landscape that competing ebook

retailers had to accept.22 6    

7 Instead, the dissent invites conduct that is strictly prohibited by the

8 Sherman Act — horizontal collusion to fix prices — to cure a perceived abuse of

9 market power.  Whatever its merit in the abstract, that preference for collusion

10 over dominance is wholly foreign to antitrust law.    See Trinko, 540 U.S. at 408

11 (referring to collusion as the “supreme evil of antitrust”).  Because of the long‐

12 term threat to competition, the Sherman Act does not authorize horizontal price

13 conspiracies as a form of marketplace vigilantism to eliminate perceived

14 “ruinous competition” or other “competitive evils.”   Maricopa Cnty. Med. Soc’y,

15 457 U.S. at 346 (quoting Socony‐Vacuum Oil, 310 U.S. at 221).  Indeed, the attempt

16 to justify a conspiracy to raise prices “on the basis of the potential threat that

                                              

22 While the dissent accuses us of supposing that “competition should be genteel,

lawyer‐designed, and fair under sporting rules,” Dissenting Op. at 5, it is the dissent’s

position that would have ebook consumers subsidize Apple’s entry into the market by

paying more for ebooks so that Apple would not have to compete on price.   

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1 competition poses . . . is nothing less than a frontal assault on the basic policy of

2 the Sherman Act.”    Nat’l Soc’y of Prof’l Eng’rs, 435 U.S. at 695.    And it is

3 particularly ironic that the “terms” that Apple was able to insist upon by

4 organizing a cartel of Publisher Defendants to move against Amazon — namely,

5 the elimination of retail price competition — accomplished the precise opposite

6 of what new entrants to concentrated markets are ordinarily supposed to

7 provide.    In short, Apple and the dissent err first in equating a symptom (a

8 single‐retailer market) with a disease (a lack of competition), and then err again

9 by prescribing the disease itself as the cure.

10 The dissent’s “frontal assault” on competition law is not only wrong as a

11 legal matter for all the reasons just given; it is also, despite its professed fidelity

12 to the district court’s view of the facts, premised on various mischaracterizations

13 of the record.    Put simply, it is far from clear that either Apple itself or other

14 ebook retailers could not have entered the ebook retail market without Apple’s

15 efforts with the Publisher Defendants to eliminate price competition.    As the

16 district court noted, “[Apple] did not attempt to argue or show at trial that the

17 price of admission to new markets must be or is participation in illegal price‐

18 fixing schemes” and did not “suggest[] that the only way it could have entered

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1 the e‐book market was to agree with the Publisher Defendants to raise e‐book

2 prices.”  Apple, 952 F. Supp. 2d at 708.   

3 The district court’s statement that Apple feared “losing money if it tried or

4 was forced to match Amazon’s pricing,” Id. at 658 — the peg on which the

5 dissent largely hangs its argument — is hardly a conclusive finding that Apple

6 would have lost money had it entered a market that featured retail price

7 competition.   Barnes & Noble, for its part, had chosen to enter and stay in the

8 market in the face of Amazon’s pricing.    Google, too, had plans to enter the

9 ebook market before Apple launched the iBookstore.  Moreover, the district court

10 never found that Apple could not have entered the market on a wholesale model

11 while charging more than Amazon for new releases and bestsellers.  To fill this

12 hole in its theory, the dissent suggests that Apple would have “impair[ed] its

13 brand” by charging more than Amazon.  Dissenting Op. at 34 (internal quotation

14 marks omitted).  But putting aside the fact that Apple’s perception of its brand

15 value is irrelevant — does the dissent really think it is desirable to require more

16 efficient competitors to charge the same as their less efficient rivals solely so the

17 latter will be spared the indignity of not charging the best price? — the district

18 court actually found that Apple believed it would have been “unrealistic[]” to

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1 charge more than its price caps after switching to an agency model, Apple, 952 F.

2 Supp. 2d at 692, a finding that says nothing about what Apple would have been

3 willing to charge under a wholesale model.   

4 The record makes clear the flaws in the dissent’s argument.   When Cue

5 was still contemplating a wholesale model, his objective was not for Apple’s

6 pricing to match Amazon’s precisely, but rather for that pricing to be “generally

7 competitive.”   J.A. 1758.   And had Apple opted to compete on both price and

8 platform but concluded that it could not match Amazon’s $9.99 pricing, some

9 consumers might well have paid somewhat more to read new releases and

10 bestsellers on the iPad, a revolutionary ereader boasting many more features

than the Kindle.23 11   The iPad was coming to market with or without a price‐fixing

                                               23 A prediction that consumers would have paid more to read ebooks on the iPad

than on the Kindle because of the iPad’s improved reading experience or other

attractive features does not somehow suggest that ebooks are “Veblen goods [or] Giffen

goods.”  Dissenting Op. at 33 n.7.  The dissent also suggests that Apple could not have

depended on the iPad’s hardware advantages as part of a strategy to charge more than

Amazon because antitrust law would have required it to open up the iPad to a Kindle

app.  Id. at 34.  But for a unilateral refusal to deal to be unlawful, the defendant must

have monopoly power, which Apple plainly did not.  See, e.g., United States v. Microsoft

Corp., 253 F.3d 34, 51 (D.C. Cir. 2001) (en banc) (“While merely possessing monopoly

power is not itself an antitrust violation, it is a necessary element of a monopolization

charge.” (citation omitted)); Elhauge, supra, at 268 (“A firm that lacks dominant market

power . . . can unilaterally choose with whom they deal without fear of antitrust

liability.”); see also Trinko, 540 U.S. at 408 (“Under certain circumstances, a refusal to

cooperate with rivals can constitute anticompetitive conduct and violate § 2.  We have

been very cautious in recognizing such exceptions, because of the uncertain virtue of

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1 conspiracy, and some iPad owners who wanted to read ebooks surely would not

2 have wanted to buy a separate Kindle solely to benefit from Amazon’s $9.99

3 pricing for new releases and bestsellers.  (Whether Apple would have viewed its

4 profits under that scenario as large enough to justify entry is not an antitrust

5 concern.)   

6 In actuality, the district court’s fact‐finding illustrates that Apple organized

7 the Publisher Defendants’ price‐fixing conspiracy not because it was a necessary

8 precondition to market entry, but because it was a convenient bargaining chip.  

9 Apple was operating under a looming deadline and recognized that, by aligning

10 its interests with those of the Publisher Defendants and offering them a way to

11 raise prices across the ebook market, it could gain quick entry into the market on

12 extremely favorable terms, including the elimination of retail price competition

13 from Amazon.  But the offer to orchestrate a horizontal conspiracy to raise prices

14 is not a legitimate way to sweeten a deal.    

15 The facts also do not support the conclusion that Amazon’s market

16 position would have discouraged other ebook retailers from entering the market

17 absent the price‐fixing conspiracy orchestrated by Apple.  Amazon popularized

                                                                                                                                                  

forced sharing and the difficulty of identifying and remedying anticompetitive conduct

by a single firm.”).

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1 ebooks with the launch of the Kindle in late 2007, and enjoyed a strong market

2 position because of its innovation.   Cf. Trinko, 540 U.S. at 407 (noting that the

3 opportunity to gain market power “induces risk taking that produces innovation

4 and economic growth”).  Barnes & Noble was Amazon’s first major competitor,

5 and when it entered the market — on a wholesale model — with the introduction

6 of the Nook in 2009, it began to erode Amazon’s market share.  The iPad itself

7 also promised to introduce more competition with or without Apple’s iBookstore

8 by providing a platform for companies to build ebook marketplaces without

9 investing in tablet development.    These new entrants gave publishers more

10 leverage to negotiate for alternative sales models or different pricing.   Indeed,

11 publishers were already in separate discussions about an agency model with

12 Barnes & Noble before Apple offered a way to swap the rigors of competition for

13 the comfort of collusion.   

14 To summarize, the district court made no finding that a horizontal

15 conspiracy to eliminate price competition in the ebook retail market was

16 necessary to bring more retailers into the market to challenge Amazon, nor does

17 the record evidence support this conclusion.    More importantly, even if there

18 were such evidence, the fact that a competitor’s entry into the market is

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1 contingent on a horizontal conspiracy to raise prices only means (absent

2 monopolistic conduct by the market’s dominant firm, which cannot lawfully be

3 challenged by collusion) that the competitor is inefficient, i.e., that its entry will

4 not enhance consumer welfare.  For these reasons, I would reject the argument

5 that Apple’s entry into the market represented an important procompetitive

6 benefit of the horizontal price‐fixing conspiracy it orchestrated.

7     b. Other Justifications

8 Apart from its and other retailers’ entry into the market, Apple points to

9 other purported procompetitive benefits of its agreement with the Publisher

10 Defendants, namely, eventual price decreases in the ebook industry and the

11 various technological innovations embedded in the iPad.    The district court

12 correctly concluded that Apple failed to establish a connection between these

13 benefits and the conspiracy among Apple and the Publisher Defendants.  Apple,

14 952 F. Supp. 2d at 694; see NCAA, 468 U.S. at 113‐15 (concluding that the need to

15 coordinate to produce intercollegiate athletics was not related to coordination on

16 television rights); XI Areeda & Hovenkamp, supra, ¶ 1908b.   

17 While it may be true that ebook prices eventually declined industry‐wide,

18 new publishers were adopting the digital format and prices were falling even

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1 before Apple’s entry into the market.   Apple did not introduce any admissible

2 evidence linking the continued influx of new titles into the ebook market to its

agreement with the Publisher Defendants.24 3   Nor did it provide an explanation

4 for how this price‐fixing agreement altered the business and pricing decisions of

5 other publishers in a procompetitive direction.  The district court’s refusal to give

6 Apple credit for these trends was therefore proper.

7 The technological innovations embedded in the iPad are similarly

8 unrelated to Apple’s agreement with the Publisher Defendants.    The iPad’s

9 backlit touchscreen, audio and video capabilities, and ability to offer consumers a

10 number of services on a single device revolutionized tablet computing.  But, as

                                               24 Apple sought to introduce expert testimony from Dr. Michelle Burtis, which it

believed would link continued long‐term growth and price changes to its launch of the

iBookstore.  However, the district court excluded this testimony on the grounds that Dr.

Burtis “did not offer any scientifically sound analysis of the cause for this purported

price decline or seek to control for the factors that may have led to it.”   Apple, 952 F.

Supp. 2d at 694 n.61.  This was no abuse of discretion.  See Zerega Ave. Realty, 571 F.3d at

212‐13.    “[T]he proponent of expert testimony has the burden of establishing by a

preponderance of the evidence” that the expert’s opinion is based on sufficient facts, is

the product of reliable principles and methods, and applies those principles and

methods reliably to the facts at hand.  United States v. Williams, 506 F.3d 151, 160 (2d Cir.

2007); see Fed. R. Evid. 702.  Dr. Burtis merely compared the average ebook prices from

the two years before Apple’s entry into the market with the average prices two years

after.  She did not account for the rapid growth and change in that industry or explain

the process she used to determine whether Apple’s agency agreements were

responsible for lower prices.  See Gen. Elec. Co. v. Joiner, 522 U.S. 136, 146 (1997); United

States v. Dukagjini, 326 F.3d 45, 54 (2d Cir. 2003).  The district court therefore acted well

within its discretion in excluding Dr. Burtis’s testimony.

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1 Apple’s witnesses testified, the company had every intention of bringing the iPad

2 to market with or without the iBookstore.   Moreover, Apple was not the only

3 entity that could use the iPad’s new features to enhance the ebook experience—

4 other retailers, or the publishers themselves, could have designed and launched

5 ebook applications on the platform.  The district court was correct not to score

6 these hardware innovations as procompetitive benefits of the agreement between

7 Apple and the Publisher Defendants to raise prices.

8 Accordingly, I agree with the district court’s decision that, under the rule

9 of reason, the horizontal agreement to raise consumer‐facing ebook prices that

10 Apple orchestrated unreasonably restrained trade.    But given the clear

11 applicability of the per se rule in this context, the analysis here is largely offered

12 in response to the dissent.  I also confidently join with my concurring colleague

13 in affirming the district court’s conclusion that Apple committed a per se

14 violation of § 1 of the Sherman Act.

15 III.  The Injunctive Order

16 Next, Apple and two of the Publisher Defendants — Macmillan and Simon

17 & Schuster — challenge specific portions of the district court’s September 5, 2013

18 injunctive order.  In particular, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster ask us to vacate

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1 the provision which prohibits Apple, for a period of time, from entering

2 agreements with the Publisher Defendants that restrict its ability to set ebook

3 prices.  S.P.A. 205.  Apple separately seeks vacatur of a provision requiring it to

4 apply the same terms and conditions to ebook applications in its App Store as it

5 does to other applications, and of the district court’s decision to appoint a

6 compliance monitor.  We address each of the parties’ arguments in turn.

7 A. Macmillan and Simon & Schuster

8 In the September 5, 2013 injunctive order, the district court mandated that

9 “Apple shall not enter into or maintain any agreement with a Publisher

10 Defendant that restricts, limits, or impedes Apple’s ability to set, alter, or reduce

11 the Retail Price of any E‐book or to offer price discounts or any other form of

12 promotions.”    S.P.A. 205.   This prohibition began upon entry of the order and

13 expires at different times for each of the Publisher Defendants.    The earliest

14 expiration date lifts the ban for agreements between Apple and Hachette

15 beginning 24 months after entry of the injunctive order.    Expiration dates for

16 agreements with each of the other Publisher Defendants are then set in six‐month

17 intervals, with Simon & Schuster’s ban expiring 36 months after entry of the final

18 judgment and Macmillan’s ban ending after 48 months.

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1 Macmillan and Simon & Schuster seek vacatur of this prohibition.   Both

2 publishers are subject to separate consent decrees, which prohibit them from

3 signing agreements with any ebook retailers which restrict the retailer’s ability to

4 “set, alter, or reduce” ebook prices, “or to offer price discounts.”  J.A. 1126; J.A.

5 1148.  The prohibition lasts two years for Simon & Schuster and 23 months for

6 Macmillan.    According to both Publisher Defendants, the district court’s

7 injunctive order against Apple, in light of these consent decrees, is unlawful for

8 two reasons.  First, they contend that the injunctive order impermissibly modifies

9 their consent decrees by extending the time during which they cannot negotiate

to restrict the price at which Apple sells ebooks.25 10   Second, they argue that DOJ

11 should have been judicially estopped from seeking a prohibition on agreements

12 limiting Apple’s discounting authority that lasts longer than two years because,

13 in the filings in support of the consent decrees, it argued that two years was a

14 sufficient amount of time to restore competition in the ebook market.   Neither

15 objection is persuasive.

                                               25 Macmillan also contends that the injunctive order broadens the restrictions

imposed by its consent decree because the decree allows the company to set certain

limits on price discounts, which it can no longer set for ebooks sold by Apple.

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1 We begin with the argument that the injunctive order impermissibly

2 amended the Publisher Defendants’ consent decrees.    Federal Rule of Civil

3 Procedure 60(b) establishes the grounds for seeking “relief from a final judgment,

4 order, or proceeding,” Fed. R. Civ. P. 60(b), including modifications of consent

5 decrees.   Rufo v. Inmates of Suffolk Cnty. Jail, 502 U.S. 367, 378‐79 (1992); United

6 States v. Eastman Kodak Co., 63 F.3d 95, 101 (2d Cir. 1995).    The rule adopts a

7 flexible approach, enumerating specific reasons for modification while also

8 allowing alterations for “any other reason that justifies relief.”    Fed. R. Civ. P.

9 60(b).  “[A] party seeking an alteration” under this catch‐all provision bears the

10 “burden of establishing that a significant change in circumstances warrants the

11 modification.”  United States v. Sec’y of Hous. & Urban Dev., 239 F.3d 211, 217 (2d

12 Cir. 2001).

13 The Publisher Defendants’ argument rests on the premise that the district

14 court’s injunctive order modified their consent decrees and therefore should

15 have complied with Rule 60(b)’s requirements.    The premise is incorrect.  

16 Macmillan’s and Simon & Schuster’s consent decrees prohibit them from

17 restricting any retailer’s authority to set prices.    The injunctive order does not

18 alter the terms of those decrees.  Instead, it provides relief against a different party

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1 by limiting Apple’s authority to negotiate away its ability to set prices in

2 agreements with any of the Publisher Defendants.  The fact that the order also

3 has the effect of preventing the Publisher Defendants from restricting Apple’s

4 pricing authority does not render it “[r]elief from a final judgment, order, or

5 proceeding” requiring a motion under Rule 60(b).    Fed. R. Civ. P. 60(b).    A

6 consent decree is “enforced as [an] order[],” but “construed largely as [a]

7 contract[].”   SEC v. Citigroup Global Mkts., Inc., 752 F.3d 285, 297 (2d Cir. 2014)

8 (internal quotation marks omitted).  Its scope must be discerned within its “four

9 corners, and not by reference to what might satisfy the purposes of one of the

10 parties to it.”  United States v. Armour & Co., 402 U.S. 673, 682 (1971); see also Perez

11 v. Danbury Hosp., 347 F.3d 419, 424 (2d Cir. 2003).  An injunctive order against an

12 entity that is not party to the consent decree and neither changes the terms of nor

13 interprets the decree does not modify the contract and therefore does not require

14 a Rule 60(b) motion.    Indeed, as a practical matter, injunctions often alter the

15 options available to other parties.  Rule 60(b) does not hold district courts issuing

16 injunctions to a higher standard simply because the injunction may affect rights

17 addressed in a different party’s consent decree.

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1 Macmillan and Simon & Schuster’s judicial estoppel argument fares no

2 better.  Judicial estoppel is “invoked by a court at its discretion,” and is designed

3 to “protect the integrity of the judicial process by prohibiting parties from

4 deliberately changing positions according to the exigencies of the moment.”  New

5 Hampshire v. Maine, 532 U.S. 742, 749‐50 (2001) (citation omitted) (internal

6 quotation marks omitted).    While the propriety of applying estoppel depends

7 heavily on the “specific factual context[]” before the court, we typically consider

8 whether the party’s argument is “clearly inconsistent with its earlier position,”

9 whether the party “succeeded in persuading a court to accept” that earlier

10 position, and whether the “party seeking to assert an inconsistent position would

11 derive an unfair advantage or impose an unfair detriment on the opposing party

12 if not estopped.  Id. at 750‐51 (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Adelphia

13 Recovery Trust v. Goldman, Sachs & Co., 748 F.3d 110, 116 (2d Cir. 2014).  “[R]elief

14 is granted only when the . . . impact on judicial integrity is certain.”  Republic of

15 Ecuador v. Chevron Corp., 638 F.3d 384, 397 (2d Cir. 2011) (internal quotation

16 marks omitted).

17 We conclude that DOJ’s arguments in support of the injunctive order were

18 neither so clearly inconsistent with its earlier arguments nor so unfairly

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1 detrimental to the Publisher Defendants as to warrant judicial estoppel.    In

2 support of the consent decrees, the Justice Department argued that a two‐year

3 ban on restricting retailers’ abilities to set prices was sufficient to “allow

4 movement in the marketplace away from collusive conditions.”    J.A. 1055.    It

5 then pushed for a longer, five‐year restriction on agreements specifically with

6 Apple.  While facially inconsistent, we have emphasized the need to “carefully

7 consider the contexts in which apparently contradictory statements are made to

8 determine if there is, in fact, direct and irreconcilable contradiction.”   Rodal v.

9 Anesthesia Grp. of Onondaga, P.C., 369 F.3d 113, 119 (2d Cir. 2004).   And here,

10 context is particularly important.    The consent decrees ban certain agreements

11 between the Publisher Defendants and any retailers.  The injunctive order, on the

12 other hand, pertained only to the Publisher Defendants’ agreements with Apple.  

13 Given the extensive factfinding at trial about the relationship that Apple

14 developed with the Publisher Defendants and its willingness to coordinate their

15 conspiracy, DOJ had a basis for distinguishing the length of the restrictions in the

16 consent decrees from those in the injunctive order.  This was not a case of a party

17 reversing courses, to the detriment of the legal system, “simply because his

18 interests have changed.”  New Hampshire, 532 U.S. at 749.

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1 Furthermore, the district court did not approve the Justice Department’s

2 request for a five‐year ban on all discounting restrictions between Apple and the

3 Publisher Defendants.    Instead, the injunctive order adopts an interval‐based

4 system, which prevents Apple from agreeing to limit its pricing authority for

5 between 24 and 48 months depending on the Publisher Defendant.  The district

6 court imposed this interval system so “there would be no point in time when

7 Apple would be renegotiating with all of the publisher defendants at once[, and]

8 no one point in time when [a] publisher defendant[] could be assured that it was

9 taking the same bargaining position as its peers vis‐à‐vis Apple.”  J.A. 2376.  This

10 independent rationale for the injunctive order ensures that DOJ’s argument did

11 not produce “inconsistent results” or compromise the integrity of the judicial

12 process.  Simon v. Safelite Glass Corp., 128 F.3d 68, 72 (2d Cir. 1997).

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1 B. Apple

2 Apple, like Macmillan and Simon & Schuster, objects to the portion of the

3 injunctive order preventing it from agreeing to limit its pricing authority.    In

4 addition, the company asks us to vacate another provision, which requires it to

5 “apply the same terms and conditions to the sale or distribution of an E‐book

6 App through Apple’s App Store as [it] applies to all other apps sold or

7 distributed through [the] App Store.”  S.P.A. 207.  Apple contends that neither

provision is necessary to protect the public.26 8   We disagree.

                                              

26 Apple also argues that the district court’s decision to appoint a monitor to

supervise the company’s compliance with the injunction went beyond its powers under

the Sherman Act and violated both Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 53 and separation‐

of‐powers principles.    Apple devoted only two conclusory sentences to these three

separate facial challenges to the district court’s authority.    We therefore deem the

arguments forfeited and do not consider them.  Frank v. United States, 78 F.3d 815, 833

(2d Cir. 1996) (“Issues not sufficiently argued are in general deemed waived and will

not be considered on appeal.”), vacated on other grounds, 521 U.S. 1114 (1997); Zhang v.

Gonzales, 426 F.3d 540, 545 n.7 (2d Cir. 2005).   We also note that, following Rule 53’s

amendment in 2003, the Advisory Committee stated that “[r]eliance on a master”

appointed under that Rule “is appropriate when a complex decree requires complex

policing, particularly when a party has proved resistant or intransigent,” and that both

the Supreme Court and this Court have approved such appointments.  Fed. R. Civ. P. 53

advisory committee’s note (2003 Amendments) (citing Local 38 of the Sheet Metal Workers’

Int’l Ass’n v. E.E.O.C., 478 U.S. 421, 481‐82 (1986)); see also Republic of the Philippines v.

N.Y. Land Co., 852 F.2d 33, 36‐37 (2d Cir. 1988) (collecting cases).    In light of this

background, it would be inappropriate to excuse Apple’s failure to argue and for this

panel to entertain its facial challenges to the district court’s authority on the scant

briefing before us.

Judge Jacobs, who sat on a separate panel of this Court that considered an as‐

applied challenge to the monitor’s conduct, contends that “the injunction warps the role

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1 “A Government plaintiff, unlike a private plaintiff, must seek to obtain

2 relief necessary to protect the public from further anticompetitive conduct and to

3 redress anticompetitive harm.”  F. Hoffmann‐La Roche Ltd. v. Empagran S.A., 542

4 U.S. 155, 170 (2004) (emphasis added).    Thus, “[w]hen the purpose to restrain

5 trade appears from a clear violation of law, it is not necessary that all untraveled

6 roads to that end be left open and that only the worn one be closed.”  Int’l Salt Co.

7 v. United States, 332 U.S. 392, 400 (1947), abrogated on other grounds by Ill. Tool

8 Works Inc. v. Independent Ink, Inc., 547 U.S. 28 (2006).  The district court has “large

9 discretion to model [its] judgments to fit the exigencies of the particular case,” id.,

10 and “all doubts” about the remedy are to be “resolved in [the Government’s]

11 favor,” United States v. E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., 366 U.S. 316, 334 (1961).

12 The district court was well within its discretion to restrict Apple’s ability to

13 give up its pricing authority and to require that Apple treat ebook applications

14 the same way that it treats other applications.  Apple relinquished its authority to

                                                                                                                                                  

of a neutral, court‐appointed referee into that of an adversary party.”  Dissenting Op. at

36.  Whatever the merits of this argument, it is not properly before us on this appeal.  

Here, Apple has asserted only (and without argumentation of any sort) that appointing

a monitor, in general, violates the Sherman Act, Rule 53, and separation‐of‐powers

principles.    The dissent’s position eschews that broad facial challenge and instead

focuses on the conduct of the monitor in this particular case, drawing entirely on a

record not before this panel, but presented to a separate panel in another appeal.   See

United States v. Apple Inc., 2015 WL 3405534 (2d Cir. 2015).    We do not believe it is

proper to resolve this appeal with reference to arguments that Apple has failed to make.

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1 set prices as part of its conspiracy with the Publisher Defendants.  By delaying

2 Apple’s ability to renegotiate similar restrictions and arranging for the

3 restrictions to expire at different times for each Publisher Defendant, the

4 injunctive order ensured that Apple and the Publisher Defendants would not be

5 able to use that same strategy as part of a new conspiracy.    The provision

6 requiring ebook applications in the App Store to receive the same terms and

7 conditions as other applications furthers that goal.  The district court expressed

8 concern that Apple and the Publisher Defendants may use ebook applications to

9 circumvent the injunction’s rules about Apple’s pricing authority, or that Apple

10 may impose restrictions on ebook applications to punish publishers who refused

11 to act in concert with their competitors.  For instance, the court found evidence

12 that Random House eventually joined the iBookstore on Apple’s desired terms in

13 part because Apple prevented the company from launching an ebook application

14 in the App Store.   The district court was therefore correct to decide that these

15 provisions of the injunctive order were “necessary to protect the public from

16 further anticompetitive conduct.”  F. Hoffmann‐La Roche, 542 U.S. at 170.

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1 CONCLUSION

2 We have considered the appellants’ remaining arguments and find them to

3 be without merit.  Because we conclude that Apple violated § 1 of the Sherman

4 Act by orchestrating a horizontal conspiracy among the Publisher Defendants to

5 raise ebook prices, and that the injunctive relief ordered by the district court is

6 appropriately designed to guard against future anticompetitive conduct, the

7 judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED.

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