Law Commons^™

Competition Upstream Of Amazon, Martin Edwards

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The rise of large, market-concentrating technology firms like Amazon, Inc. is driving commentators, regulators, and politicians to rethink the law of antitrust. In particular, “New Antitrust” reformers propose that the narrow focus on consumer welfare has caused antitrust law to stop too short in corralling the broader social and economic consequences of Big Tech’s “bigness.” Proponents of the consumer welfare standard argue that it has worked well to distinguish beneficial competition from harmful aggression and, further, to reduce costly legal uncertainty. There is now momentum for substantial reform to antitrust law and practice and a growing debate about what such …

Competition And Innovation: The Breakup Of Ig Farben, Felix Poege

Faculty Scholarship

The relationship between competition and innovation is difficult to disentangle, as exogenous variation in market structure is rare. The 1952 breakup of Germany’s leading chemical company, IG Farben, represents such a disruption. After the Second World War, the Allies occupying Germany imposed the breakup because of IG Farben’s importance for the German war economy instead of standard antitrust concerns. In technology areas where the breakup reduced concentration, patenting increased strongly, driven by domestic firms unrelated to IG Farben. An analysis of patent texts shows that an increased propensity to patent does not drive the effect. Descriptively, IG Farben’s successors increased …

Regulating New Tech: Problems, Pathways, And People, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

New technologies bring with them many promises, but also a series of new problems. Even though these problems are new, they are not unlike the types of problems that regulators have long addressed in other contexts. The lessons from regulation in the past can thus guide regulatory efforts today. Regulators must focus on understanding the problems they seek to address and the causal pathways that lead to these problems. Then they must undertake efforts to shape the behavior of those in industry so that private sector managers focus on their technologies’ problems and take actions to interrupt the causal pathways. …

Taking It With You: Platform Barriers To Entry And The Limits Of Data Portability, Gabriel Nicholas

Michigan Technology Law Review

Policymakers are faced with a vexing problem: how to increase competition in a tech sector dominated by a few giants. One answer proposed and adopted by regulators in the United States and abroad is to require large platforms to allow consumers to move their data from one platform to another, an approach known as data portability. Facebook, Google, Apple, and other major tech companies have enthusiastically supported data portability through their own technical and political initiatives. Today, data portability has taken hold as one of the go-to solutions to address the tech industry’s competition concerns.

This Article argues that despite …

Network Effects In Action, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

This Chapter begins by examining and exploring the theoretical and empirical limits of the possible bases of network effects, paying particular attention to the most commonly cited framework known as Metcalfe’s Law. It continues by exploring the concept of network externalities, defined as the positive external consumption benefits that the decision to join a network creates for the other members of the network, which is more ambiguous than commonly realized. It then reviews the structural factors needed for models based on network effects to have anticompetitive effects and identifies other factors that can dissipate those effects. Finally, it identifies alternative …

Libra: A Concentrate Of "Blockchain Antitrust", Thibault Schrepel

Michigan Law Review Online

Blockchains promise to decentralize the economy, bypassing trusts in favor of decentralized communities. The World Economic Forum predicts that 10 percent of the global gross domestic product will be stored on block-chain by 2027. Gartner further prophesizes that blockchain will create $3.1 trillion worth of business value by 2030. Even if that prediction turns out to be too optimistic, blockchain’s legal implications cannot be neglected.

The Direct Purchaser Requirement In Clayton Act Private Litigation: The Case Of Apple Inc. V. Pepper , Konstantin G. Vertsman

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

More than fifty years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Hanover Shoe, Inc. v. United Shoe Machinery Corp. established the direct purchaser rule, the Supreme Court was provided with an opportunity in Apple Inc. v. Pepper to reevaluate and update the proximate cause standing requirement for litigation under § 4 of the Clayton Act. In the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision, the majority opinion established a rule that consumers who purchase directly from a monopolist satisfy the direct purchaser standing requirement notwithstanding the internal business structure of the monopolist. This interpretation of the direct purchaser rule, along with the recent reformulation …

The Future Of Law And Mobility, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

With the launch of the new Journal of Law and Mobility, the University of Michigan is recognizing the transformative impact of new transportation and mobility technologies, from cars, to trucks, to pedestrians, to drones. The coming transition towards intelligent, automated, and connected mobility systems will transform not only the way people and goods move about, but also the way human safety, privacy, and security are protected, cities are organized, machines and people are connected, and the public and private spheres are defined.

Exclusion In Digital Markets, Konstantinos Stylianou

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

This article recasts the existing analytical framework on exclusion to account for the technology-intensive nature of digital markets. It discusses:

a) technological ways that affect the competitive intensity in digital markets
b) empirical data on the durability of competitive advantage in digital markets, and
c) the nature of exclusion as a monopolization tactic from a technological point of view

The technology element is important because as a matter of order it is technological capabilities and limitations that define what the transactional overlay can be, not the other way around. Economists start from the pre-assumption that “in the beginning there [are] …

Newsroom: Rwu Wins Cyber Crime Moot At Ucla 04-24-2017, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Patent Protection For Crispr: An Elsi Review, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

The revolutionary gene-editing technology, CRISPR, has raised numerous ethical, legal, and social concerns over its use. The technology is also subject to an increasing patent thicket that raises similar issues concerning patent licensing and research development. This essay reviews several of these challenges that have come to the fore since CRISPR’s development in 2012. In particular, the lucre and complications that have followed the CRISPR patent dispute may affect scientific collaboration among academic research institutions. Relatedly, universities’ adoption of “surrogate licensors” may also hinder downstream research. At the same time, research scientists and their institutions have also used CRISPR patents …

Book Review: Technology Control, Competition, And National Security. Edited By Bernard L. Seward, Jr. University Press Of America, 1987., Dorinda G. Dallmeyer

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

E-Books, Collusion, And Antitrust Policy: Protecting A Dominant Firm At The Cost Of Innovation, Nicholas Timchalk

Seattle University Law Review

Amazon’s main rival, Apple, went to great lengths and took major risks to enter the e-book market. Why did Apple simply choose not to compete on the merits of its product and brand equity (the iPad and iBookstore) as it does with its other products? Why did Apple decide not to continue to rely on its earlier success of situating its products differently in the market than other electronics and working hard to be different and cutting-edge with its e-book delivery? This Note argues that the combination of Amazon’s 90% market share, network externalities, and an innovative technology market creates …

District Courts Versus The Usitc: Considering Exclusionary Relief For F/Rand-Encumbered Standard-Essential Patents, Helen H. Ji

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Technological standards allow manufacturers and consumers to rely upon these agreed-upon basic systems to facilitate sales and further invention. However, where these standards involved patented technology, the process of standard-setting raises many concerns at the intersection of antitrust and patent law. As patent holders advocate for their patents to become part of technological standards, how should courts police this activity to prevent patent holdup and other anti-competitive practices? This Note explores the differing approaches to remedies employed by the United States International Trade Commission and the United States District Courts where standard-essential patents are infringed. This Note further proposes that …

Possible Paradigm Shifts In Broadband Policy, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Debates over Internet policy tend to be framed by the way the Internet existed in the mid-1990s, when the Internet first became a mass-market phenomenon. At the risk of oversimplifying, the Internet was initially used by academics and tech-savvy early adopters to send email and browse the web over a personal computer connected to a telephone line via networks interconnected through in a limited way. Since then, the Internet has become much larger and more diverse in terms of users, applications, technologies, and business relationships. More recently, Internet growth has begun to slow both in terms of the number of …

The Innovation Commons, 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 …

Patent Value And Citations: Creative Destruction Or Strategic Disruption?, David S. Abrams, Ufuk Akcigit, Jillian Popadak

All Faculty Scholarship

Prior work suggests that more valuable patents are cited more and this view has become standard in the empirical innovation literature. Using an NPE-derived dataset with patent-specific revenues we find that the relationship of citations to value in fact forms an inverted-U, with fewer citations at the high end of value than in the middle. Since the value of patents is concentrated in those at the high end, this is a challenge to both the empirical literature and the intuition behind it. We attempt to explain this relationship with a simple model of innovation, allowing for both productive and strategic …

Intellectual Property Misuse, 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 …

Competition In Information Technologies: Standards-Essential Patents, Non-Practicing Entities And Frand Bidding, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Standard Setting is omnipresent in networked information technologies. Virtually every cellular phone, computer, digital camera or similar device contains technologies governed by a collaboratively developed standard. If these technologies are to perform competitively, the processes by which standards are developed and implemented must be competitive. In this case attaining competitive results requires a mixture of antitrust and non-antitrust legal tools.

FRAND refers to a firm’s ex ante commitment to make its technology available at a “fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory royalty.” The FRAND commitment results from bidding to have one’s own technology selected as a standard. Typically the FRAND commitment is …

Is There A Role For Common Carriage In An Internet-Based World?, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

During the course of the network neutrality debate, advocates have proposed extending common carriage regulation to broadband Internet access services. Others have endorsed extending common carriage to a wide range of other Internet-based services, including search engines, cloud computing, Apple devices, online maps, and social networks. All too often, however, those who focus exclusively on the Internet era pay too little attention to the lessons of the legacy of regulated industries, which has long struggled to develop a coherent rationale for determining which industries should be subject to common carriage. Of the four rationales for determining the scope of common …

Section 5 And The Innovation Curve, Daniel A. Crane

Book Chapters

the ftc’s authority to use Section 5 of the FTC Act to reach anticompetitive conduct that would not be illegal under the Sherman or Clayton Acts has been much discussed in recent years, particularly in conjunction with the FTC’s enforcement action against Intel. As of this writing, a Section 5 action against Google seems imminent.

Slides: Sources Of Electrical Energy For Those Who Are Remote And Poor, Frank Barnes

2012 Energy Justice Conference and Technology Exposition (September 17-18)

Presenter: Dr. Frank Barnes, Distinguished Professor, Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering, University of Colorado

24 slides

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 …

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 …

Creating A Plug-In Electric Vehicle Industry Cluster In Michigan: Prospects And Policy Options, Thomas P. Lyon, Russell A. Baruffi Jr.

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

This Article seeks to examine how policy can be used strategically to foster the development of a plug-in electric vehicle ("PEV") industry cluster in Michigan. The tendency for certain industries to localize in particular regions has captured the interest of much economic research and policy discussion in recent years. The trend toward the clustering of new industries has stayed strong despite the acceleration of globalization. Attention to clusters has proven to be an enduring theme in economic development circles for nearly thirty years. Clusters generate synergies that make industrial activity greater than the sum of contributions by individual players. In …

An Innovation-Centric Approach Of Telecommunications Infrastructure Regulation, Konstantinos Stylianou

Konstantinos Stylianou

This paper considers the mechanics and role of innovation in telecommunications networks, and explains how regulation can be designed to maximize innovation. To better focus on the relationship between innovation and regulation an effort is made to distinguish innovation from competition, although the two concepts are closely related, and several reasons are presented on why the fast changing, networked and technical nature of telecommunications offers a very favorable environment for innovation to thrive, as well as why innovation benefits from a large number of actors. Moreover, the paper further explains that even small players are useful in the innovation process …

Wireless Net Neutrality Regulation And The Problem With Pricing: An Empirical, Cautionary Tale, Babette E.L. Boliek

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

I present here a unique empirical analysis of the consumer welfare benefits of prior regulation in the mobile telecommunications industry. In particular, I analyze the relative consumer benefits of state rate regulation and federal entry regulation. The institution of filing requirements and FTC review and approval of various consumer pricing regimes is highly analogous to the consumer price controls imposed by various state level public utility commissions in the past. Furthermore, the imposition of a zero-price rule is analogous to past rate regulation; in particular it is similar to past wholesale regulation with its underlying principles of open access and …

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 …

Pharma's Nonobvious Problem, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

This Article considers the effect of the recent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in KSR International Co. v. Teleflex, Inc. on the nonobviousness standard for patentability as applied to pharmaceutical patents. By calling for an expansive and flexible analysis and disapproving of the use of rigid formulas in evaluating an invention for obviousness, KSR may appear to make it easier for generic competitors to challenge the validity of drug patents. But an examination of the Federal Circuit's nonobviousness jurisprudence in the context of such challenges reveals that the Federal Circuit has been employing all along the sort of flexible …

Towards A Differentiated Products Theory Of Copyright, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

The well-known “access-incentives” tradeoff that lies at the heart of the standard economic analysis of copyright follows largely from the assumption that copyright turns authors into monopolists. If one instead analyzes copyright through a framework that allows for product differentiation and entry, the access-incentives tradeoff becomes less significant. By increasing producer appropriability and profit, increased copyright protection can stimulate entry of competitors producing similar works, which in turn results in lower prices, increased product variety, and increased access. This approach would also broaden set of available policy instruments, although disentangling the effects of one from another can be quite complicated.