Fun in Court

One of the more amusing things about the trial of Apple for price-fixing (I posted about how it might affect the future of books here) is that it will require Apple's lawyers to call St. Steve of Cupertino a liar.

In its papers, lawyers for Apple have accused the government of basing its case "on mere allegations, faulty assumptions and unfounded conclusions." The Cupertino, Calif.-based company has denied claims that its agreements required publishers to force Amazon to charge more for e-books. 

The agreements "required no such thing," the defence papers say. "They set forth the terms of Apple's business relationship with each publisher; they placed no constraints on how a publisher should deal with other retailers, including Amazon."

But the problem is that that doesn't quite jibe with what Jobs said about it:

The former Apple CEO "conceded the price-fixing conspiracy when, the day after publicly announcing Apple's forthcoming iBookstore, he explained to his authorized biographer that Apple had told the publishers, 'We'll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30 per cent, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that's what you want anyway,"' the government says in court papers.

Should be fun seeing how they dance around that one. But then, I'm easily amused.