Apple CEO Tim Cook must participate in a seven-hour deposition during his company’s upcoming legal battle with Epic Games. Epic reportedly wanted Cook for eight hours, while Apple lawyers tried to whittle it down to four hours.
Seven hours is the compromise that was ultimately ruled on by Judge Thomas S. Hixon.
Cook is a particularly high-profile “get” for a deposition. However, as Hixon points out, “There is really no one like Apple’s CEO who can testify about how Apple views competition in these various markets that are core to its business model.”
Apple lawyers’ request to subpoena Samsung in the case was denied. They supposedly wanted to show that Apple’s policies are no different than other large companies in a similar position when it comes to distributing software.
Apple’s court battle with Epic commences in May
Apple’s court battle with Epic will commence in May. It started in August, when Epic came up with a way to let users get around the App Store to buy in-app purchases for its super-popular game Fortnite. Epic did not want to pay Apple the 30% cut that Cupertino demands for such payments. In the aftermath, Apple booted Fortnite from the App Store. Epic then hit back with a lawsuit accusing Apple of being a monopoly. Things, unsurprisingly, continued along similarly contentious lines since then.
What will we learn from the lawsuit in terms of Cook’s testimony? We’ll have to wait to find out. This isn’t Cook’s first time speaking about Apple’s internal processes in a legal setting, however. Last summer, he appeared in front of Congress to answer questions about, among other things, Apple’s handling of the App Store. The App Store generated an estimated $72.3 billion in revenues in 2020.
Nonetheless, such courtroom appearances sometimes result in the release of interesting information. For instance, during Cupertino’s legal battle with Samsung, we got to read Apple executive Phil Schiller’s emails blasting Apple’s ad agency.
Via: Gizmodo
