Law Commons^™

Schumpeterian Competition And Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Joseph Schumpeter's vision of competition saw it as a destructive process in which effort, assets and fortunes were continuously destroyed by innovation. One possible implication is that antitrust's attention on short-run price and output issues is myopic: what seems at first glance to be a monopolistic exclusionary practice might really be an innovative enterprise with enormous payoffs in the long run. While this may be the case, three qualifications are critical. First, one must not confuse the prospect of innovation with the scope of the intellectual property laws; their excesses and special interest capture cast serious doubt on the proposition …

The Walker Process Doctrine: Infringement Lawsuits As Antitrust Violations, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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Antitrust law's Walker Process doctrine permits a patent infringement defendant to show that an improperly maintained infringement action constitutes unlawful monopolization or an unlawful attempt to monopolize. The infringement defendant must show both that the lawsuit is improper, which establishes the conduct portion of the violation and generally satisfies tort law requirements, and also that the structural prerequisites for the monopolization offense are present. The doctrine also applies to non-patent infringement actions and has been applied by the Supreme Court to copyright infringement actions. Walker Process itself somewhat loosely derives from the Supreme Court's Noerr-Pennington line of cases holding that …

Is Europe Unfairly Attacking Another U.S. High Technology Company?, Robert H. Lande

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This short piece considers whether the EU antitrust action against Intel constitutes an example of European regulators attacking a successful US company in order to protect a European competitor, or whether it instead is an example of legitimate law enforcement.

Patent Deception In Standard Setting: The Case For Antitrust Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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Many patent applications are rejected upon initial submission, but they are almost never rejected with absolute finality. Further, subsequent to filing its original application a patent applicant might wish to write an application with broader or somewhat different claims, or perhaps add claims that were not made in the original application. Or it may wish to rewrite claims that had been rejected in the original application. A patent "continuation" is an application for additional claims made on a patent that was previously applied for.

Under generally accepted patent practices in the United States, when a subsequent continuation or divisional application …

L’Affaire Microsoft Ou L’Interopérabilité, Nouvelle Valeur Du Droit De La Concurrence ?, Severine Dusollier

Severine Dusollier

No abstract provided.

Antitrust Liability For Refusal To License Intellectual Property: A Comparative Analysis And The International Setting, Rita Coco

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

Antitrust and IP law both share the goals of promoting innovation and benefiting consumers. A potential for conflict exists, however, when a dominant firm's refusal to license IP rights affects the dynamics of competition. Antitrust intervention in IP rights can reduce incentives to invest, whereas a failure to allow anticompetitive behavior can harm consumers and competitors while reducing the efficiency of the economic system. The author reviews the European and United States approaches to monopolization claims involving IP rights. The European approach is limited by the mismatch between national enforcement of IP rights and community enforcement of antitrust law. The …

Wagging The Dog? Reconsidering Antitrust-Based Regulation Of Ip-Licensing, Gosta Schindler

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

This Article criticizes the institutional setup in which the antitrust policies regarding IP exploitation are designed and enforced. The author compares how IP licensing is scrutinized by antitrust regimes in the European Union and the United States. The result of that comparison leads to the conclusion that any attempted resolution of the IP-Antitrust dilemma will remain inadequate as long as it is antitrust-based, that is, regulated by antitrust laws or guidelines designed by antitrust-agencies. The author argues that antitrust concerns can and should be accounted for through proper construction and application of the IP laws themselves. The article suggests a …

Why The "Single Entity" Defense Can Never Apply To Nfl Clubs: A Primer On Property-Rights Theory In Professional Sports, Marc Edelman

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Legal Turbulence After : New Possibilities For Patent Licensing At Research Institutions, Jonathan Hillel

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Innovation And The Domain Of Competition Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust policy and the IP laws are both concerned with practices that restrain competition unnecessarily by reducing the size of the public domain beyond that which the Constitution contemplates, or as Congress intended for them to be expanded. In fact, antitrust has a dual role as promoter of competition in IP intensive markets. It regulates both restraints on competition and restraints on innovation. The first line protector of the competitive process in innovation is the IP statutes themselves. The Constitutional Mandate to Congress to create intellectual property regimes in order to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts is …

The Intellectual Property-Antitrust Interface, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This historical overview examines the relationship between antitrust policy and intellectual property in the United States since 1890. Over most of this history, judges imagined far greater conflicts between antitrust policy and intellectual property rights than actually existed, or else relied on sweeping generalizations rather than close analysis. For example, they often assumed that the presence of an intellectual property right led to anticompetitive effects where there was no basis for finding any injury to competition at all. At the other extreme, they often concluded that an intellectual property right immunized seriously anticompetitive conduct even when the intellectual property statute …