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Prophylactic Merger Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Prophylactic Merger Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
An important purpose of the antitrust merger law is to arrest certain anticompetitive practices or outcomes in their “incipiency.” Many Clayton Act decisions involving both mergers and other practices had recognized the idea as early as the 1920s. In Brown Shoe the Supreme Court doubled down on the idea, attributing to Congress a concern about a “rising tide of economic concentration” that must be halted “at its outset and before it gathered momentum.” The Supreme Court did not explain why an incipiency test was needed to address this particular problem. Once structural thresholds for identifying problematic mergers are identified there …
Pay-For-Delay Settlements In The Wake Of Actavis, Michael L. Fialkoff
Pay-For-Delay Settlements In The Wake Of Actavis, Michael L. Fialkoff
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
“Pay-for-delay” settlements, also known as reverse payments, arise when a generic manufacturer pursues FDA approval of a generic version of a brand-name drug. If a patent protects the brand-name drug, the generic manufacturer has the option of contesting the validity of the patent or arguing that its product does not infringe the patent covering the brand-name drug. If the generic manufacturer prevails on either of these claims, the FDA will approve its generic version for sale. Approval of a generic version of a brand-name drug reduces the profitability of the brand-name drug by forcing the brand-name manufacturer to price its …
Actavis, The Reverse Payment Fallacy, And The Continuing Need For Regulatory Solutions, Daniel A. Crane
Actavis, The Reverse Payment Fallacy, And The Continuing Need For Regulatory Solutions, Daniel A. Crane
Articles
The Actavis decision punted more than it decided. Although narrowing the range of possible outcomes by rejecting the legal rules at the extremes and opting for a rule of reason middle ground, the opinion failed to grapple with the most challenging issues of regulatory policy raised by pharmaceutical patent settlements. In particular, it failed to clearly delineate the social costs of permitting and disallowing patent settlements, avoided grappling with the crucial issues of patent validity and infringement, and erroneously focused on “reverse payments” as a distinctive antitrust problem when equally or more anticompetitive settlements can be crafted without reverse payments. …
Post-Sale And Related Distribution Restraints Involving Ip Rights, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Post-Sale And Related Distribution Restraints Involving Ip Rights, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
This book of CASES AND MATERIALS ON INNOVATION AND COMPETITION POLICY is intended for educational use. The book is free for all to use subject to an open source license agreement. It differs from IP/antitrust casebooks in that it considers numerous sources of competition policy in addition to antitrust, including those that emanate from the intellectual property laws themselves, and also related issues such as the relationship between market structure and innovation, the competitive consequences of regulatory rules governing technology competition such as net neutrality and interconnection, misuse, the first sale doctrine, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Chapters …
Antitrust And The Movement Of Technology, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Antitrust And The Movement Of Technology, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
Patents create strong incentives for collaborative development. For many technologies fixed costs are extremely high in relation to variable costs. A second feature of technology that encourages collaborative development is the need for interoperability or common standards. Third, in contrast to traditional commons, intellectual property commons are almost always nonrivalrous on the supply side. If ten producers all own the rights to make a product covered by a patent, each one can make as many units as it pleases without limiting the number that others can make. That might seem to be a good thing, but considered ex ante it …
Resale Price Maintenance: Consignment Agreements, Copyrighted Or Patented Products And The First Sale Doctrine, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Resale Price Maintenance: Consignment Agreements, Copyrighted Or Patented Products And The First Sale Doctrine, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
The rule of reason adopted for resale price maintenance in the Supreme Court’s Leegin decision, which upset the century old Dr. Miles rule of per se illegality, requires some reconsideration of a number of issues about antitrust treatment of RPM. Under the old per se rule, bona fide “consignment” agreements were not covered by Section 1 of the Sherman Act at all because there was said to be no qualifying “agreement” between the supplier and the dealer. Rather the dealer was simply said to be acting as an agent of the seller. However, insofar as RPM produces competitive dangers, such …
American Needle And The Boundaries Of The Firm In Antitrust Law, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
American Needle And The Boundaries Of The Firm In Antitrust Law, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
In American Needle the Supreme Court unanimously held that for the practice at issue the NFL should be treated as a “combination” of its teams rather than a single entity. However, the arrangement must be assessed under the rule of reason. The opinion, written by Justice Stevens, was almost certainly his last opinion for the Court in an antitrust case; Justice Stevens had been a dissenter in the Supreme Court’s Copperweld decision 25 years earlier, which held that a parent corporation and its wholly owned subsidiary constituted a single “firm” for antitrust purposes. The Sherman Act speaks to this issue …
American Needle: The Sherman Act, Conspiracy, And Exclusion, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
American Needle: The Sherman Act, Conspiracy, And Exclusion, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
This essay, part of a colloquium in the CPI Antitrust Journal, explores the meaning and significance of the Supreme Court’s decision in American Needle v. NFL. The Supreme Court held that for purposes of the dispute at hand the NFL should be treated as a collaboration of its member teams rather than a single entity. The factors that the Supreme Court considered most important were, first, that the NFL’s member teams are individually owned profit making entities who compete with each other in at least some economic markets, such as that for the sale of apparel bearing NFL symbols. …