Epic attacks Apple again: Tech giant ‘has no rights to fruits’ of its labor

CARY – Epic Games is continuing its legal onslaught against Apple in an antitrust fight over fees Apple requires clients to pay when selling products through its app store.

Apple “has no rights to the fruits of Epic’s labor,” Epic said in a filing on Friday in the federal court where its lawsuit is being heard, PCMage reports.

The privately held Cary-based enertainment and technology company says that its workaround to avoid Apple’s fees “are a far cry from the tortious—even purportedly criminal—conduct that Apple’s Opposition depicts.”

Epic did not “steal anything that belonged to Apple,” according to a report in The Verge.

Adds PCMag:

“Apple’s repeated assertions of theft boil down to the extraordinary assertion that Epic’s collection of payments by players of Epic’s game to enjoy the work of Epic’s artists, designers, and engineers is the taking of something that belongs to Apple.”

The companies have been fighting since August.

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has scheduled a bench trial for next May.

The lawsuit has grown increasingly more bitter as the longtime business partners fight over Apple’s ban of Epic Games’ popular Fortnite from its app store in a fight on 30% fees Apple charges for in-app purchases.

On Oct. 9, the judge refused to lift Apple’s ban on Fortnite, saying Epic had suffered a “self-inflicted wound” by creating a workaround for the Apple fee that triggered Apple’s ban.

However, Rogers also let stand her decision that Apple could not ban all Epic activities from the store, including its Unreal game development engine.

″Epic’s lawsuit is nothing more than a basic disagreement over money,” Apple says in a filing with the District Court for the Northern District of California.

“Although Epic portrays itself as a modern corporate Robin Hood, in reality it is a multi-billion dollar enterprise that simply wants to pay nothing for the tremendous value it derives from the App Store.”