An appellate court's ruling in the case of the United States vs Apple is final. The tech firm must pay $450 million to settle the antitrust case, after the Supreme Court refused to hear Apple's appeal of the ruling.
The High Court made no comment when it refused Apple's appeal.
Apple will pay $400 million to e-book publishers, $30 million in legal fees and $20 million to the 30 states that sued it. The five publishers implicated in the scandal have already paid out a combined $166 million to the plaintiffs in the suit.
The majority of the individuals who bought the overpriced e-book will receive relief in the form of automatic credits via their e-book retailers, according to the U.S. Justice Department. Those credits may be put towards future purchases.
Finally, Apple's part in consciously conspiring with publishers to push up the prices of e-books has been "settled once and for all," stated Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division.
"And consumers will be made whole," Baer said. "The outstanding work of the Department of Justice team - working with our steadfast state attorney general partners - exposed this cynical misconduct by Apple and its book publisher co-conspirators and ensured that justice was done."
Apple is believed to have conspired with HarperCollins Publishers, Penguin Group, Hachette Book Group, Holtzbrinck Publishers LLC ( Macmillan) and Simon & Schuster. The defendants were allegedly unhappy with the price points Amazon had set when it started selling e-books, so they orchestrated a scheme to raise the standard.
To set the standard for higher prices, about a 40 percent price increase, the group worked out a scheme in which publishers would set the price point instead of retailers, concluded U.S. District Judge Denise Cote of Southern District of New York.
In her opinion, Cote noted comments the late Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder, made when asked why people would pay Apple more when Amazon was selling the same e-books for much less.
"Jobs paused and with a knowing nod responded, 'The price will be the same,' and explained that 'publishers are actually withholding their books from Amazon because they are not happy,'" wrote Cote in her ruling.
