Apple CEO Tim Cook is answering the question of how he’s different from Steve Jobs by fighting charges of eBook price fixing in federal court rather than settling with the U.S. government in exchange for a slap on the wrist. Cook considers Apple to be innocent of the charges, and more centrally wants to protect Apple’s legal ability to collectively negotiate pricing with content owners in the future, so he’s going to trial and intends to win the battle the hard way. Steve Jobs would have settled the charges and been done with it. Cook is showing his mettle.

Steve Jobs famously hated distractions. Shortly after returning to the company outsourced the interest payments for Apple’s online customer financing, passing up the revenue opportunity because Apple was still recovering from its mid nineties funk and he didn’t want anyone in the building losing focus. When an errant tech blog made up a phony defect with the iPhone 4 and created a panic among users, rather than sue the slanderer, Jobs simply handed out free cases to users, who then concluded that the imaginary antenna defect was fixed by the cases. It made the problem go away. But it also allowed the iPhone 4 antenna defect to be written into the public record despite having never existed. We know now that if Tim Cook had been CEO of Apple at the time, he’d have hauled the perpetrators into court to prove that there was no antenna defect. Because that’s more or less what Cook is doing now with the eBook price fixing charges, distraction or no distraction.

Rather than take a slap on the wrist and make the charges go away in a manner that Apple might regret later, Tim Cook is insisting that the federal government put Apple on trial. That’ll give him the chance to prove for all to see that the eBook price fixing charges are without merit, and that the Feds are overreaching just to keep up appearances. We know Cook will win, because he wouldn’t have asked for a trial if Apple’s lawyers weren’t already 100% certain of the outcome. But until now, we didn’t know that Cook was this much of a fighter.