This agreement would only have to do with that discounting, I think. The action by the state AGs (Attorneys General) and the class action suits are the ones that would result in you getting that store credit or cash, I believe. It wouldn’t surprise me if those checks could be years away.

I think the EU has a stronger history of having ended a fixed price book agreement (that did happen in the UK), and it might be more obvious that you can’t fight and win there…

While I’m not a lawyer, I do not think it will be months. Here’s part of it:

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1.

They must terminate their Agency Agreements with Applewithin seven days after entry of the proposed FinalJudgment. See Proposed Final Judgment § IV.A.2.

They must terminate those contracts with e-book retailersthat contain either a) a restriction on the e-bookretailer’s ability to set the retail price of any e-book,or b) a “Price MFN,” as defined in the proposed FinalJudgment,
5
as soon as each contract permits starting thirty days after entry of the proposed Final Judgment. See id.at § IV.B.

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It will depend somewhat on the cycle of their agreements with Apple, I think, but my guess is that this happens quite soon…I think two months would be a long time for this.

I don’t know if Amazon will make an announcement…they may want to play it cool, and just say something about “new low prices”. They still deal with the Big Six for a lot of reasons, and still do partnerships with, for example, Penguin. The “This price was set by the publisher” will go away for the settling publishers.

Random House is a very interesting question. They haven’t been named…yet, and their situation is a lot different for gathering evidence. They joined much later…about a year later. Therefore, they weren’t agreeing to the Agency Model at the same time as the other companies, so the collusion part might be much more difficult. RH has been known to fight in court, but I also think of them as the smartest of the Big Six…even though they may try and assert more rights than they have, in my opinion. They’ve seen what it’s like to not be Agency Model when the rest of the Big Six are, so they have some data on it that nobody else has. They are big and strong enough to be the only one doing what they choose to do, but I would hope they would end the Agency Model also.

I wonder why Apple won’t offer the same terms they are pitching to EU (allowing discounting for 2 years) to make the lawsuit go away. Maybe they will, or maybe they too deeply committed to their legal strategy.