Cengage Advantage Books: Foundations of the Legal Environment of Business 2nd Edition by Marianne Jennings, Albert Napier, Marianne Jennings

Exercise 3

Booklocker.com, an independent print-on-demand publishing company, along with other similar publishers, brought a class action suit against Amazon. com. The suit claimed that Amazon was in violation of federal antitrust law based on Amazon's tying its online bookstore services being available to print-on-demand publishers to Amazon's use of the printing services provided by a printing company that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon. Amazon has argued that it does not have market power because it is just one bookseller of many and that print-on-demand publishers have other sellers they can work with for sales. What are the issues in this case? Is the required use of Amazon's printing subsidiary an illegal tying arrangement? [ BookLocker.com, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., 650 F. Supp. 2d 89 (D.Me. 2009).]