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Full-Text Articles in Law
Patents And Price Fixing By Serial Colluders, Michael J. Meurer, William Kovacic, Robert Marshall
Patents And Price Fixing By Serial Colluders, Michael J. Meurer, William Kovacic, Robert Marshall
Faculty Scholarship
Antitrust law has long been mindful of the danger that firms may misuse their patents to facilitate price fixing. Courts and commentators addressing this danger have assumed that patent-facilitated price fixing occurs in a single market. In this Article, we extend conventional analysis to address firms’ patent misuse to facilitate price fixing across multiple products lines. By doing so, we expose gaps in existing agency enforcement and scholarly proposals for reform. Important legal tests that make sense in the single market setting do not carry over to the context we call serial collusion, where certain offenders engage in repeat collusion …
The Antitrusting Of Patentability, Saurabh Vishnubhakat
The Antitrusting Of Patentability, Saurabh Vishnubhakat
Faculty Scholarship
Deciding a patent’s validity is costly, and so is deciding it incorrectly. Judges and juries must expend significant resources in order to reach a patent validity determination that is properly informed by the relevant facts. At the same time, patent validity determinations reached quickly and cheaply may conserve resources today while creating future costs. Wrongly preserving an invalid patent can distort the competitive market and enable abuses, such as nuisance litigation. Meanwhile, wrongly striking down a valid patent can undermine incentives for continued investment and commercialization in knowledge assets. Courts facing patent validity issues have begun to strike this balance …
Intellectual Property Experimentalism By Way Of Competition Law, Tim Wu
Intellectual Property Experimentalism By Way Of Competition Law, Tim Wu
Faculty Scholarship
Competition law and Intellectual Property have divergent intellectual cultures – the former more pragmatic and experimentalist; the latter influenced by natural law and vested rights. The US Supreme Court decision in Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis is an intellectual victory for the former approach, one that suggests that antitrust law can and should be used to introduce greater scrutiny of the specific consequences of intellectual property grants.
Patent Settlements, Risk, And Competition, Mark R. Patterson
Patent Settlements, Risk, And Competition, Mark R. Patterson
Faculty Scholarship
PowerPoint presentation delivered at the session, Patent Settlements: The Issues Beyond the "Reverse Payment" Cases at the ABA 59th Annual Antitrust Spring Meeting, March 30, 2011.
When Is Property Intellectual: The Leveraging Problem Essays, Mark R. Patterson
When Is Property Intellectual: The Leveraging Problem Essays, Mark R. Patterson
Faculty Scholarship
Patents and copyrights protect inventions and expression; they do not protect products. This distinction, I argue in this essay, is a key to the antitrust problem of the "leveraging" of intellectual property. In a typical leveraging case, the manufacturer of a durable good, like a copier or computer, refuses to sell replacement parts for its equipment unless the purchaser also hires the manufacturer to service the equipment. Such a practice can be illegal under antitrust law, but when the leveraging products-in this example, replacement parts-are protected by patent or copyright, the manufacturer will often claim that the leveraging is a …