Gadgetory

hello and welcome to inside scoop I'm Sumi das and joining me is Josh Lowensohn senior writer for cnet Josh thanks for being with us it's beer okay so apples corporate legal team is getting a workout last year it was the patent trial of the century which they won this year it's a slightly different set of players it's Apple versus the DOJ what is the case what are the charges sure so last year the Department of Justice basically sued apple along with a bunch of book publishers the major book publishers accusing them of fixing prices on ebooks so their basic argument was that when Apple came along prices for ebooks went from ten dollars up to twelve thirteen fourteen and fifteen dollars so the DOJ is really trying to figure out whether they all work together then make that happen and how that really affected the ebooks market and so far it's just been day one of opening arguments right yeah this thing basically just started it's set to the last about three weeks so both sides kind of opened up today and then we're going to see witnesses from both sides including on Apple's Eddy Cue who runs the iBookstore and runs iTunes and iCloud along with some of the CEOs from the major publishers and Apple was offered a settlement they've said that they turned it down they're the only ones right I mean everybody else settled out of court yep and a lot of the legal experts we talked to before the trial started said that Apple was actually going to settle it was almost guaranteed but then last week Tim Cook during interview said you know what they offer us a settlement we said we wouldn't sign it because it basically said that we were wrong and we we were making bad decisions and they said they didn't want to do that they don't want to make that admission exactly but at the same time you know the judge in this case and a pre-trial hearing said you know what I kind of I'm signing with the DOJ it looks like Apple doesn't really have quite the case so that's what kind of makes this interesting what does Apple really have up its sleeve that kind of makes them think they're going to win it do we have an idea what what their case might be I mean based on sort of the responses we've seen so far yeah you know so far they really say that this is similar to music before they came along you know it was kind of scattered people weren't really making as much money it was hard for consumers and then they came along with the iPad and I the iBookstore and all of a sudden everything worked out again I don't know if people going to buy that I think one of the key problems here is before they came on books were a lot cheaper right but apples argument so far has really been the publishers weren't really making a lot of money so if you look at something like that music publishers a favor exactly if you look at something like music it made sense that maybe people weren't getting paid cuz of piracy and steve jobs at the time argued that if you price this any lower people are just going to stop buying it okay so why is this case significant I mean we are seeing huge increases in the amount of people who are reading ebooks right yeah it's not just about the product itself of e-books it's also about how much control company can have over fixing these prices if that's indeed what happened if you look at something like this it's all about a clause it says one company has to get the same price as another company as long as it's lower and that's kind of been you know it's kind of a semantic issue but it also kind of takes that idea and says what else could this be applied to not just books but also movies TV shows anything like that any precedents and if you look at a company like apple or Amazon or anybody else but they have their hands in all these different markets something like this I can have a very big impact mm-hmm you're gonna be keeping an eye on this case absolutely we're gonna be there in court every day looking forward to that I've ever Thank You Josh we will check in with you again for inside scoop I'm Sumi das thanks for watching