Apple’s CEO and other executives are being sued by its shareholders

Apple shareholders are suing CEO Tim Cook along with some of the company’s other executives and directors, claiming that their role in a price-fixing conspiracy with publishers damaged the company. According to a complaint filed on Thursday in California state court, Cook and other senior Apple figures bear “responsibility for ensnaring Apple in a multi-year anticompetitive scheme” that resulted in a highly-publicized trial and a proposed $450 million payout by the company to settle related complaints that it illegally raised the price of ebooks. The new lawsuit, a so-called “derivative suit,” is a type of corporate litigation that is available to shareholders who believe that a company’s own directors won’t take action to protect it from mismanagement. Such suits, however, have also been described as a form of shakedown in which law firms extract easy payouts from big corporations.