What you need to know
- Apple has made its rebuttal to Epic Games' appeal in its blockbuster App Store trial.
- Apple states that the court was right to rule against Epic on all of the issues presented.
- The company says that the Fortnite maker "overreached".
Apple has hit back at Epic Games in its main appeal filing pertaining to the massive App Store trial going on between the two companies.
In a filing, Apple responded to Epic stating that the court was right to rule in Apple's favor. "Epic did not lose the trial due to any legal error," the filing states. "Epic lost because it "overreached" by asserting claims on the "frontier edges of antitrust law."
Apple says that Epic's claims of anticompetitive conduct were not only "unprecedented" but also "unfounded", and that the company tried to build its case on witnesses who lacked credibility and were unreliable, with testimony "wholly lacking in an evidentiary basis", even accusing some of stretching the truth.
Apple said in its opening statement that Epic's "coordinated global crusade", Project Liberty, was a move "through which Epic seeks to influence courts, regulators, and legislators to fundamentally change Apple's App Store so that Epic can make more money selling virtual currency to gamers."
The opening barbs are part of a 135-page filing, which goes on to assert that Apple's App Store distribution model is lawful and that Epic did not prove any substantial anticompetitive effects.
Foss Patents' Florian Mueller, passing an initial reaction to the filing stated:
It's a 135-page PDF, and federal appeals courts rarely get such lengthy submissions, but it admittedly has an even higher information density, or signal-to-noise ratio, than Epic's opening brief. This does not mean that I agree with how Apple portrays the facts and suggests legal conclusions. There's much in it that I completely reject. But the focus is definitely on substance (right or wrong) rather than rhetoric--to a noticeably greater degree than in Epic's case, parts of which read like a policy paper.
Downplaying Epic's prospects, Mueller said that Apple "has several paths to affirmance" of the court's previous ruling, while Epic "has no convincing path to an outright reversal because it would overstep the limits of what an appeal can reasonably achieve."
