Apple shareholders sue Tim Cook over e-book conspiracy

You’re most probably familiar with the expression “out of the frying pan into the fire.”

Having seemingly settled its e-book price-fixing lawsuit by agreeing to pay $450 million, Tim Cook and other top Apple execs are now being sued by Apple shareholders, claiming that the incident has damaged the company.

As per a complaint filed at the end of last week, Cook and other Apple executives were told that they should accept “responsibility for ensnaring Apple in a multi-year anticompetitive scheme.”

The new lawsuit is called a “derivative suit,” which describes the corporate litigation available to shareholders who believe that a company’s board of directors won’t take the appropriate steps to protect it from mismanagement.

Often such suits are viewed as shakedowns used by law firms to extract easy money from giant companies, who are willing to settle to make the problem go away.

Given that Apple is seemingly going from strength-to-strength this year, it would seem to be hard to put together a case that Tim Cook is doing his job too badly.

The shareholder complaint can be read in full below:

Crane v. Cook et al

Source: Gigaom

Luke Dormehl

Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.