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Apple argues against Epic Games’ injunction request saying wounds are self inflicted

On 28th September Epic Games and Apple will meet in court again. Technically the legal counsel for the two firms will meet, but let’s not split hairs.

While Epic Games has won a battle in its ongoing war with Apple, the Cupertino Colossus wants to cut Epic Games off at the pass and prevent it from filing a preliminary injunction that would see Fortnite returned to the Apple App Store while a longer legal battle continues.

The 37-page opposition is a long read, but as you progress, it becomes hard to side with Epic Games on this matter. That’s not to say we agree with the 30 percent cut Apple takes from in-app purchases through its App Store.

Apple wastes no time in explaining how Epic Games has enjoyed the benefits of the App Store since 2018. This includes developer tools, featuring the game in keynote events, placing billboards featuring Fortnite in Times Square at Apple’s expense and more importantly, granting it access to App Store users.

Apple argues that there is no basis to grant Epic Games an injunction as it fails to meet the four traditional factors that should be affecting it to justify an injunction.

“In sum, Epic’s unprecedented and unsupported antitrust claims are doomed to fail on the merits, and thus Epic has not demonstrated likelihood of legal success; Epic’s asserted harm is the self-inflicted and self-fixable result of its own cheating and breach and thus not irreparable; and the balance of hardships and public interest favor Apple because the relief requested by Epic risks harming the iPhone ecosystem and around a billion iPhone users around the world,” said Apple.

Now, while Apple makes a very good argument we’d be lying if we said that we don’t support Epic Games in some small way.

While what Tim Sweeney and Epic Games did was a clear violation of the App Store rules, it’s those rules Epic Games is trying to change and we support that.

Could Epic Games have done this in a better way without risking its bottom line? We don’t think so.

The reason we say that is that Apple doesn’t seem to be opposed to the idea of negotiating its cut taken from in-app purchases.

We know that Amazon negotiated a deal with Apple that saw the Cupertino firm taking a 15 percent cut from in-app purchases for Amazon Prime Video rather than 30 percent.

Had Epic Games done that it might’ve enjoyed the discount but a conversation about Apple’s App Store tax would surely have fizzled out.

Unfortunately for Epic Games, Apple’s argument for denying its injunction is very good and we’re curious to see the outcome.

You can read Apple’s full argument here.

[Via – The Verge]

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