Kensington Antitrust Advisors Group

In Booklocker.com Inc. v. Amazon.com Inc., Maine District Court Judge John A. Woodstock Jr. rejected Amazon.com Inc.’s bid to toss a proposed antitrust class action filed against it by print-on-demand (POD) book publisher Booklocker.com Inc.  The case alleges that Amazon improperly tied the use of its Internet site to the printing services of its subsidiary BookSurge by requiring Booklocker to use BookSurge to print their titles in order to list them on the Amazon Web site.  The Court found that Booklocker 1) sufficiently alleged a condition that established a tie by claiming that Amazon made threats to POD publishers to cut off their access to its bookstore site unless they used BookSurge’s printing services; 2) had met its burden to show sufficient economic power at this stage; and 3) adequately alleged that a tie of Amazon’s sale of books online to its printing services foreclosed a substantial amount of commerce in the printing service.  Although allowing the lawsuit to proceed, the court declined to make a premature judgment on the most important question, which is whether Amazon had foreclosed competition on the merits in the market for POD printing by its conditioning of access to the direct Amazon sales channel.