Apple tried on the final second to get out of manufacturing a trove of paperwork by Monday because it was ordered to in its ongoing dispute with Epic, and Justice of the Peace Judge Thomas Hixson will not be having it. In early August, the corporate was given a deadline of September 30 to supply paperwork regarding the modifications it made to its App Retailer guidelines this yr, which was its try and fulfill an injunction. Apple initially advised the court docket that the duty would entail reviewing roughly 650,000 paperwork — however in a standing report on Thursday, it mentioned the quantity had ballooned to over 1.3 million, and requested for a two-week extension. Hixson denied the request on Friday in a strongly worded order noticed by The Verge, and referred to as out Apple’s transfer as “bad behavior.”
Apple and Epic have been submitting joint standing reviews to the court docket each two weeks, and the problem of Apple’s paperwork exceeding its earlier estimate by no means beforehand got here up, the choose famous. “This information would have been apparent to Apple weeks ago,” Hixson mentioned in the order. “It is simply not believable that Apple learned of this information only in the two weeks following the last status report.” The choose mentioned the request raises different issues, calling into query the standard of Apple’s reviews and its intentions round complying in a well timed method. Apple has “nearly infinite resources” that it may have tapped to get the duty carried out in the allotted time, in line with Hixson.
“This is a classic moral hazard,” Hixson mentioned in the order, “and the way Apple announced out of the blue four days before the substantial completion deadline that it would not make that deadline because of a document count that it had surely been aware of for weeks hardly creates the impression that Apple is behaving responsibly.”
