A federal choose dominated in favor of the Justice Department in its effort to dam to merger of Penguin Random House with Simon & Schuster
“Defendants are hereby enjoined and restrained from consummating the proposed merger, or otherwise effecting a combination of Penguin Random House, LLC, and Simon & Schuster, Inc.,” Judge Florence Pan wrote in a court docket submitting issued on Monday night.
Pan’s full opinion has but to be made public, however she wrote that she discovered that “the United States has shown that ‘the effect of [the proposed merger] may be substantially to lessen competition’ in the market for the U.S. publishing rights to anticipated top-selling books.”
The full opinion might be launched when each side meet to debate proposed redactions.
Her ruling is a big victory for the Biden-era Justice Department, which challenged the $2.2 billion transaction on the idea of its influence on the workforce, quite than on customers, as is usually the case. More particularly, the DOJ argued that the merger would diminish advances for top profile titles, or anticipated greatest promoting books, driving down advances for authors. Among those that testified for the federal government was Stephen King, who informed the choose within the non-jury trial that “consolidation is bad for the competition.”
Dan Petrocelli, representing Penguin Random House, argued that the federal government had created “an artificial market to create artificial concentration to create artificial harm.” He additionally challenged the methodology that the federal government used to scrutinize the merger.
The DOJ claimed that the Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster transaction would create a publishing behemoth that instructions 49 p.c of the marketplace for greatest sellers. The DOJ’s case was centered on the influence of the merger on writer advances of $250,000 or extra for probably the most anticipated titles.
More to return.
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