The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to accept Apple's appeal against the lower court's "contempt of court" finding in its ongoing litigation with Epic Games. This decision may push the case further towards Apple. The dispute between Apple and Epic over App Store rules has been going on for many years. Both parties have been waiting for the Supreme Court to formally intervene in the dispute. Now this issue has finally been answered clearly.
According to Reuters, the Supreme Court agreed to review two key claims made by Apple, which argued that lower courts had made legal errors in their handling of these issues. Once the Supreme Court supports Apple's view, the relevant judgment may be overturned or significantly adjusted, which will have a profound impact on current and similar lawsuits in the future. It is currently unclear when the Supreme Court will hear the case. Lawyers for all parties are preparing for future hearings, and the timing of the final ruling is even more uncertain.
According to Apple’s 34-page appeal document submitted to the Supreme Court in May this year, Apple believed that the “anti-steering injunction” issued by the local court against it exceeded the scope of authorization of the relevant provisions of CASA. Apple also claimed that the lower court's determination that it violated the ban and punished it with "contempt of court" was based on the so-called "violation of the spirit of the law" rather than the legal provisions themselves. This application method of replacing "letter" with "spirit" constitutes an error. Apple stated at the time that if the Supreme Court could make an authoritative judgment on this issue, it would help clarify the boundaries of legal application in similar cases in the future. Otherwise, the existing rulings surrounding "CASA" may be equivalent to being "abolished."
For Apple, the ideal outcome would be for the Supreme Court to overturn the existing contempt finding and send the case back to the lower court for review. This may not only prompt modifications to the current anti-bootstrap ban, but does not even rule out the possibility of the ban being completely revoked. After losing some of its anti-bootstrap provisions in an initial lawsuit in 2020, Apple has removed old anti-bootstrap restrictions from its App Store rules and introduced a new mechanism that allows developers to jump to external purchase channels.
However, this new mechanism still retains revenue sharing for Apple: when developers facilitate transactions through external links, they still need to pay a 12% or 27% commission to Apple Pay, and the relevant rules apply to all developers located in the United States. Epic immediately filed a new complaint, believing that Apple was maintaining its original business model in "disguise", and ultimately prompted the court to find that Apple violated the injunction and constituted contempt of court. However, the original text of the ban did not impose specific restrictions on whether Apple could charge commissions. The relevant controversy focused on whether Apple's actions violated the "legislative intention and spirit" of the ban.
After Apple formally filed an appeal with the Supreme Court, Epic publicly opposed the action as expected and argued in a 35-page document around the application of the "spirit of the law" and the "letter of the law." Epic believes that the lower court's approach in citing the exceptions to CASA is "difficult to understand" and emphasizes that this is not a "class of one" case and should not be excluded from the relevant scope of application as Apple said. In response, Apple stated in a follow-up response that Epic’s argument just proves the need for review by the Supreme Court to draw clearer boundaries for the legal application of such cases.
At present, with the Supreme Court officially agreeing to accept Apple's appeal, the focus of the case has further risen from a simple business model dispute to a level surrounding the effectiveness of the injunction and the upper court's definition of the discretionary space of the lower court. Regardless of the final verdict, this case will become an important legal benchmark for large platforms and developers on issues such as anti-bootstraps, platform commissions, and ban enforcement standards.