Displaying items by tag: Price Fixing

Although I am writing this article today the facts behind it have spanned the course of a few years going back to when Steve Jobs first fell out of the public eye and Tim Cook took over the day to day duties as CEO (although he did not have the title). At the time there were subtle indications that things were not going well at Apple even with the record sales and massive money pile in the bank. Some of the items that kept showing up in the media were about what would happen to Apple if and when Steve Jobs was gone. The articles a speculation were backed up every time there was a rumor about Steve Jobs’ health and Apple stock took a hit.

So yesterday (Friday May 18^th) we heard that Apple was censoring the word “jailbreak” in iTunes and the App Store. This was reported by a few sites and seemed to be rather odd after the backlash from the obvious censoring of a single search string when using Apple’s Siri Voice Assistant. When we ran the story on Siri we had a rather large and enthusiastic response to the article. The one thing that many people kept trying to say was that Apple did not alter the results, but more on that after we talk about the jailbreak issue.

In the last few days we have seen a couple of things that just might break the old business model of the MPAA and RIAA. The indicators are things like the decision that code is not physical property was pushed down by the 2d appeals court only a matter of days ago along with an increase in lobby presence by some media content providers (not the content owners) while the final piece of the puzzle is actually the US DOJ suite against Apple and a handful of book publishers for price fixing.

Although this is not really new information; it appears that there is enough evidence that the major players in the e-book market have been collaborating to keep e-book prices higher than they should be in the US that an investigation has been started into this. The investigation comes just days after a similar announcement from the EU which is focusing on five of the largest publishing companies and Apple.