Defendants

I don't know how much weight friends of the court carry in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

But the pro-Apple (AAPL) amici curiae brief filed Wednesday by two economists lays out clearly -- more clearly perhaps than Apple's own trial lawyers -- the economic and legal issues the company tried and failed to get across to Judge Denise Cote last June. (See The view from the hard benches.)

It looks like 2012 is shaping up to be an interesting year for publishers and the agency model. With multiple class action lawsuits filed this summer against publishers over the 2010 switch to the agency model (some also including Amazon and Barnes & Noble), the matter has been referred to the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (MDL Panel) to coordinate and consolidate the cases, either in New York or Northern California. According to Barnes & Noble's quartlerly filing with the SEC, the MDL Panel met on December 1, 2011, and the deadline for filing motions to dismiss

If Amazon (AMZN) is the 500-lbs. gorilla in the e-book trade, why has Apple's much smaller iBookstore been targeted? The answer lies in a deal that Steve Jobs cut with the five publishers named in the probe shortly before the iPad press conference in January 2010, when he announced the formation of the iBookstore.