Marcus Mendes, reporting for 9to5Mac:
Apple today filed a request with the Supreme Court in an attempt
to reverse key lower court rulings over the App Store injunction
in its long-running legal battle with Epic Games. […] In its
petition, Apple is asking the Supreme Court to review two
questions.The first is whether Apple should have been held in contempt for
charging a commission on purchases made outside the App Store. The
second is about the scope of the injunction.On the first point, Apple argues that the original injunction did
not specifically address commissions. Instead, it says the order
only prevented Apple from blocking developers from including
buttons, external links, or other calls to action directing users
to external purchasing options.According to Apple, that is not the same as saying the company
could not charge a commission on those purchases. The Ninth
Circuit acknowledged that the text of the injunction did not
address commissions, but still upheld the contempt finding by
relying on the idea that a party can violate the “spirit” of an
injunction, even when the injunction does not specifically
prohibit the conduct at issue.
Apple’s argument here is that only the letter of the law matters, and the letter of the injunction did not say anything about charging commissions on external payments, and thus they can’t be held in contempt for violating something that was never spelled out explicitly.
As for the second point, regarding scope, Apple argues that the
injunction extends far beyond Epic itself, as it applies to all
registered developers worldwide with apps on the U.S. App Store
storefront. That includes developers that were never part of the
Epic case, and, as Apple has pointed out before, even companies
that compete with Epic.Apple argues that this directly conflicts with the Supreme Court’s
2025 decision in Trump v. CASA, which limited the ability of
federal courts to issue broad injunctions that go beyond the
parties actually involved in a case.
Apple’s argument here is that even if the Supreme Court upholds the contempt finding, the exemption from commissions should only apply to Epic, not to all developers in the U.S. App Store. I am definitely not a constitutional law scholar, but I think this would have been a long-shot argument pre-CASA. But post-CASA I think Apple might have something here, with this Court.
Apple’s full petition is not yet publicly available, but should be soon from the Supreme Court’s website. I’ve seen a copy, and Mendes’s summary jibes with my reading. In the meantime, here’s SCOTUSblog’s index page for Trump v. CASA, and here’s Mila Sohoni’s analysis of the CASA ruling.
