Publishers object to Department of Justice’s punishment for Apple in eBooks case

Five publishers have filed objections with the US Department of Justice regarding the DOJ’s choice of punishment in a recent anti-trust ruling against the Cupertino company. The ruling found Apple guilty of conspiring to fix e-book prices, forcing customers to pay a higher price. The proposed punishment would require them to cut off their current agreements with the five publishers in question and avoid entering new agreements for five years that could prohibit competitiveness in the market.

The publishers objecting to the proposed punishment say that rather than punishing Apple, the decision actually hurts the settling parties by disallowing them to enter into new agreements with Apple using the agency model while doing nothing to prevent Apple from engaging in anti-competitve e-book pricing behavior.

Apple pushed out a new developer preview of OS X Mavericks earlier today that included the first beta bulid of iBooks for Mac, the very bookstore that lead to the anti-trust case against Apple to begin with.