Apple’s court case with Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, began Monday. Furthermore, it could be heading to a jury trial, Cnet reported. It also appears the Judge was not altogether enamoured by the gamesmaker’s initial approach.
Apple And Epic Games Heads for Jury Trial
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers upheld Apple’s ban on Fortnite during the court of the antirust case. She described “the frontier of antitrust law” and said it will likely be heard in July 2021. The judge said:
I know that I’m just a stepping stone for all of you. Whoever loses is going to take it up and say everything I did was wrong — that’s what litigators do. There’s no hard feelings, that’s the job. But I think it is important enough to understand what real people think. Do these security issues concern people or not?
She was though seemingly unimpressed with the case put forward by Epic’s legal team. She said that the company had “lied…by omission” about its decision to try and circumvent the App Store in-app payment system, despite contractual agreements with Apple. “You were not forthright,” she said. “You were told you couldn’t do it, and you did. There’s an old saying, a rose by any other name is still a rose […] There are plenty of people in the public could consider you guys heroes for what you did, but it’s still not honest.”