Judge Approves Apple's $450 Million E-book Settlement

After months of waiting, the class action lawsuit alleging that Apple played foul with its iBooks customers by fixing the price of e-books may at least be coming to an end. Today U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote accepted Apple's $450 million proposal to settle the suit, although she expressed concern regarding the timing of the proposal.

According to Reuters, Judge Cote thought the document Apple submitted was an "unusually structured settlement, especially for one arrived at on the eve of trial." Apple originally submitted the settlement back in July, after all the parties involved agreed to the $450 million sum. At the onset of the suit, the opposing lawyers had asked for $840 million.

The settlement may have been approved, but Apple still hopes to win its Dec. 15 appeal of an earlier ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (which Cote presides over as well), which stated that the Cupertino company was culpable of working with major book publishers to inflate prices for its store.

Should Apple win the appeal (and thus be found not guilty of breaking antitrust laws), the submitted settlement could keep the Cupertino company from paying a dime to either consumers of the lawyers involved. If Apple is found guilty, however, it'll "only" have to pay $400 million to as many as 23 million consumers. (The remaining $50 million would go to legal fees.) Alternatively, the case could end up being retried.

Apple first got into trouble when the U.S. Department of Justice argued that the iPhone maker had used "agency model" pricing to keep suppliers from selling the same books they sold to Apple to other retailers at lower prices. The model was meant to compete with the wholesale model employed by businesses such as Amazon, which allows them to set their own prices below cost.

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