Decide rejects Apple’s last-minute request for a deadline extension in Epic case

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 Decide Thomas Hixson shouldn’t be having it. In early August, the corporate was given a deadline of September 30 to provide paperwork regarding the this yr, which was its try and fulfill an injunction. Apple initially instructed 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 noticed by , and referred to as out Apple’s transfer as “unhealthy conduct.”

Apple and Epic have been submitting joint standing experiences 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 data would have been obvious to Apple weeks in the past,” Hixson mentioned within the order. “It’s merely not plausible that Apple realized of this data solely within the two weeks following the final standing report.” The choose mentioned the request raises different considerations, calling into query the standard of Apple’s experiences and its intentions round complying in a well timed method. Apple has “almost infinite sources” that it may have tapped to get the duty executed within the allotted time, in line with Hixson.

“This can be a traditional ethical hazard,” Hixson mentioned within the order, “and the best way Apple introduced out of the blue 4 days earlier than the substantial completion deadline that it will not make that deadline due to a doc rely that it had absolutely been conscious of for weeks hardly creates the impression that Apple is behaving responsibly.”