Epic Games on Monday will attempt to overturn parts of a court docket ruling in an antitrust trial final 12 months that largely favoured Apple.

The “Fortnite” creator sued Apple in 2020 alleging that the iPhone maker’s App Store guidelines, beneath which software program builders should pay commissions of as much as 30 p.c on in-app purchases, violated US antitrust legislation.

After a three-week trial final 12 months, a choose largely sided with Apple, stopping in need of dubbing the corporate an “illegal monopolist” and upholding its proper to cost the commissions.

But the choose did discover that Apple violated its dwelling state of California’s unfair competitors legislation and ordered the corporate to let builders inform customers how you can make app purchases exterior of its proprietary fee system.

Apple appealed the order, and Epic appealed the discovering that Apple didn’t violate antitrust legal guidelines. The two sides will argue their case earlier than the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Monday, with representatives from the US Department of Justice and the state of California additionally making appearances to explain related legal guidelines.

According to its court docket filings, Epic plans to argue that the trial choose didn’t correctly interpret US antitrust legal guidelines. In explicit, the trial choose dominated that Apple’s contracts with builders to make use of its App Store didn’t violate antitrust legal guidelines as a result of they have been non-negotiable agreements — builders both agreed or couldn’t use the App Store. Epic argues that such normal agreements are nonetheless topic to antitrust legal guidelines.

Other massive know-how corporations use related agreements to protect entry to their techniques. The Department of Justice, which has been investigating Apple and different tech corporations, requested to affix the Epic attraction as a result of it stated the decrease court docket ruling may “significantly harm antitrust enforcement beyond the specific context of this case.”

© Thomson Reuters 2022