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Full-Text Articles in Law
Do Patent Challenges Increase Competition?, Stephen Yelderman
Do Patent Challenges Increase Competition?, Stephen Yelderman
Stephen Yelderman
As a general rule, judges and scholars believe settlement is a good thing. But for nearly a century, the Supreme Court has said that patent litigation is categorically different, since it offers the chance to increase competition by freeing the public from the burdens of a monopoly. Based on this theory, and in the hopes of seeing more patent litigation fought to completion, the Court has overturned long-standing common-law doctrines, declined to enforce otherwise-valid contracts, and—in the recent case of Federal Trade Commission v Actavis, Inc—subjected patent settlements to scrutiny under the antitrust laws. Similar reasoning has resulted in legislative …
Perfume By Any Other Name May Smell As Sweet…But Who Can Say?: A Comment On L’Oreal V. Bellure, Carys J. Craig
Perfume By Any Other Name May Smell As Sweet…But Who Can Say?: A Comment On L’Oreal V. Bellure, Carys J. Craig
Carys Craig
L’Oréal v. Bellure is a remarkable case. The ruling of the European Court of Justice, as reluctantly applied by the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, protects the plaintiff’s trade-mark rights against free-riding and prohibits the defendants from taking any commercial advantage of the reputation attaching to the plaintiff’s famous perfume brands. In doing so, it limits free competition and commercial expression without identifying any real harm (consumer confusion, blurring or tarnishment of the marks) or providing any clear public benefit that would justify such intervention. In this article, I argue that the case reflects a perception of trade-mark …
Antitrust And The Patent System: A Reexamination, Herbert Hovenkamp
Antitrust And The Patent System: A Reexamination, Herbert Hovenkamp
Herbert Hovenkamp
Since the federal antitrust laws were first passed they have cycled through extreme positions on the relationship between competition law and the patent system. Previous studies of antitrust and the patent system have generally assumed that patents are valid, discrete, and generally of high quality in the sense that they further innovation. As a result, increasing the returns to patenting increases the incentive to do socially valuable innovation. Further, if the returns to the patentee exceed the social losses caused by increased exclusion, the tradeoff is positive and antitrust should not interfere. If a patent does nothing to further innovation, …
Refusals To Deal With Competitors By Owners Of Patents And Copyrights: Reflections On The Image Technical And Xerox Decisions, Joseph P. Bauer
Refusals To Deal With Competitors By Owners Of Patents And Copyrights: Reflections On The Image Technical And Xerox Decisions, Joseph P. Bauer
Joseph P. Bauer
Under the patent and copyright laws, the owner of a patent for an invention or of a copyright for a work has the right to sell, license or transfer it, to exploit it individually and exclusively, or even to decide to withhold it from the public. By contrast, under the antitrust laws, a unilateral refusal to deal may constitute an element of a violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act, and the courts may then impose a duty on the violator to deal with others, including possibly with its actual or would-be competitors. The central question addressed by this …
Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale
Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale
Frank A. Pasquale
After discussing how search engines operate, and sketching a normative basis for regulation of the rankings they generate, this piece proposes some minor, non-intrusive legal remedies for those who claim that they are harmed by search engine results. Such harms include unwanted (but high-ranking) results relating to them, or exclusion from high-ranking results they claim they are due to appear on. In the first case (deemed inclusion harm), I propose a right not to suppress the results, but merely to add an asterisk to the hyperlink directing web users to them, which would lead to the complainant's own comment on …
Beyond Microsoft: Intellectual Property, Peer Production And The Law’S Concern With Market Dominance., Daryl Lim
Daryl Lim
No abstract provided.
Interests In The Balance: Fda Regulations Under The Biologics Price Competition And Innovation Act, Parker Tresemer
Interests In The Balance: Fda Regulations Under The Biologics Price Competition And Innovation Act, Parker Tresemer
Parker Tresemer
Recent biotechnology advances are yielding potentially life-saving therapies, but without FDA regulations designed to minimize product costs, patients will continue to be unable to afford these expensive biologic products. Many believe that these prohibitive costs stem from weak competition from generic biologic products, also known as follow-on biologics. To correct this deficiency, and to address the often conflicting regulatory and policy concerns associated with biologic products, Congress enacted the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act. The Act created an abbreviated approval pathway for biologic products and, if effective, could increase competition while driving down product costs. But legislation alone is …