US v. Apple could go to the Supreme Court

It is apparent that the Department of Justice’s case against Apple case raises novel legal questions that could well end up commanding the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court.

For casual observers of the case, this had not been so obvious before. That's because the legal questions raised by the conduct of the five publishing companies who were also originally named as Apple's co-conspirators and co-defendants in the case -- Hachette, HarperCollins, MacMillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster -- did not pose comparably challenging questions. Apple had a vertical relationship to all the other players in the alleged plot. As a result, its conduct poses far less familiar factual and legal questions. While there have been prior cases in which vertical players have participated in horizontal antitrust conspiracies, these have usually involved situations where a behemoth vertical player was the instigator and chief beneficiary of the whole scheme—the "ringmaster," as courts have put it. Apple doesn't fit that template, though.