Law Commons^™

What Do We Worry About When We Worry About Price Discrimination? The Law And Ethics Of Using Personal Information For Pricing, Akiva A. Miller

Akiva A Miller

New information technologies have dramatically increased sellers’ ability to engage in retail price discrimination. Debates over using personal information for price discrimination frequently treat it as a single problem, and are not sufficiently sensitive to the variety of price discrimination practices, the different kinds of information they require in order to succeed, and the different ethical concerns they raise. This paper explores the ethical and legal debate over regulating price discrimination facilitated by consumers’ personal information. Various kinds of “privacy remedies”—self-regulation, technological fixes, state regulation, and legislating private causes of legal action—each have their place. By drawing distinctions between various …

The Commons, Capitalism, And The Constitution, George Skouras

George Skouras

Thesis Summary: the erosion of the Commons in the United States has contributed to the deterioration of community and uprooting of people in order to meet the dynamic demands of capitalism. This article suggests countervailing measures to help remedy the situation.

Eu Concerted Practices & Us Concerted Actions: Beyond William H. Page’S Proposal, Mariateresa Maggiolino, Federico Ghezzi

mariateresa maggiolino

The recent analysis developed by professor William H. Page on the US notion of concerted actions raised the idea to develop an article that exams in-death the EU meaning of concerned practices and that skein of US doctrines that focus on several phenomena running from facilitating practices to invitations to collude, plus factors and agreements to exchange information. According to professor Page, the current definition of concerted actions misses the opportunity to use inter-firm communications as the discriminating factor between cases of collusive pricing practices and cases of interdependent parallel behaviors that result in the same market price. To …

Patent Trolls Among Us, Kent R. Acheson

Kent R Acheson

As Acheson (2012) suggested in A Study of the Need to Change United States Patent Policy, software should not be patented, but the Intellectual Property Rights should be protected in another manner that does not entail a Copyright, Trademark, or secrecy. A new form of protection should be created based on certain criteria, such as useful life of a patent, incremental innovation, value to society, and or value to life.

Putting Innovation Incentives Back In The Patent-Antitrust Interface, Thomas K. Cheng

Thomas K. Cheng

This Article proposes a new approach, the constrained maximization approach, to the patent-antitrust interface. It advocates a return to the utilitarian premise of the patent system, which posits that innovation incentives are preserved so long as the costs of innovation are recovered. While this premise is widely accepted, it is seldom applied by the courts in patent-antitrust cases. The result is that courts and commentators have been overly deferential to dynamic efficiency arguments in defense of patent exploitation practices, and have failed to scrutinize the extent to which patentee reward is genuinely essential to generating innovation incentives. Under the constrained …

Fixing Frand: A Pseudo-Pool Approach To Standards-Based Patent Licensing, Jorge Contreras

Jorge L Contreras

Technical interoperability standards are critical elements of mobile telephones, laptop computers, digital files, and thousands of other products in the modern networked economy. Most such standards are developed in so-called voluntary standards-development organizations (SDOs) that require participants to license patents essential to the standard on terms that are “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” (FRAND). FRAND commitments are thought to avoid the problem of patent hold-up: the imposition of excessive royalty demands after a standard has been widely adopted in the market. While, at first blush, FRAND commitments seem to assure product vendors that patents will not obstruct the manufacture and sale …

The Evolving Populisms Of Antitrust, Sandeep Vaheesan

Sandeep Vaheesan

Scholars often divide the eras of U.S. antitrust law into those of “populism” and “economics” and posit a fundamental conflict between the two concepts. Generally, the decisions of the current antitrust era are described as economic, and the mid-twentieth century period is labeled as populist. A review of Supreme Court decisions on antitrust reveals a more complex picture. From the enactment of the Sherman Act in 1890, the Court’s antitrust rulings have spoken of populist goals and aimed to advance these objectives through economically informed rules. Populism versus economics is thus a false dichotomy.

The populism and economics of antitrust …

Transaction Cost-Benefit Analysis, With Applications To Financial Regulation, D. Bruce Johnsen

D. Bruce Johnsen

As Coase convincingly showed, transaction costs inhibit the ability of market participants to achieve first-best outcomes. This paper proposes a novel and relatively simple alternative to traditional cost-benefit analysis when regulated parties face sufficiently low transaction costs that they can bargain directly or rely on competitive markets to set efficient terms of trade. In these settings, the only informational burdens financial market regulators need bear to assess corrective rules is to identify the relevant parties, the “good” they hope to exchange, and the transaction costs that inhibit them from maximizing joint gains from trade. A rule is justified only if …

Game Over For First Sale, Stephen J. Mcintyre

Stephen J McIntyre

Video game companies have long considered secondhand game retailers a threat to their bottom lines. With the next generation of gaming consoles on the horizon, some companies are experimenting with technological tools to discourage and even prevent gamers from buying and selling used games. Most significantly, a recent patent application describes a system for suppressing secondhand sales by permanently identifying game discs with a single video game console. This technology flies in the face of copyright law’s “first sale” doctrine, which gives lawful purchasers the right to sell, lease, and lend DVDs, CDs, and other media. This Article answers a …

The Evolving Populisms Of Antitrust, Sandeep Vaheesan

Sandeep Vaheesan

Scholars often divide the eras of U.S. antitrust law into those of “populism” and “economics” and posit a fundamental conflict between the two concepts. Generally, the decisions of the current antitrust era are described as economic, and the mid-twentieth century period is labeled as populist. A review of Supreme Court decisions on antitrust reveals a more complex picture. From the enactment of the Sherman Act in 1890, the Court’s antitrust rulings have spoken of populist goals and aimed to advance these objectives through economically informed rules. Populism versus economics is thus a false dichotomy.

The populism and economics of antitrust …

A More Harmonious Approach To Evaluate Pharmaceutical Patent Litigation’S “Reverse Payment Settlements”: What About The Patents?, Wenhao Leu

Wenhao Leu

"Reverse Payment Settlements" in pharmaceutical patent litigations represent one of the most challenging legal issues to resolve today because the courts do not have the right tools to do so. Though sharp divisions exist among the circuit courts with application of different tests, none of them has yet to achieve the right balance between the patentees' right to exclude and consumers' need for cheaper generic drugs.

This paper examines more closely the IP aspects of Reverse Payment Settlement agreements—the pharmaceutical patents—in order to resolve their antitrust issues. With weaker patents that are susceptible to invalidation or findings of non-infringement, pharmaceutical …

Eu Concerted Practices & Us Concerted Actions: Beyond William H. Page’S Proposal, Federico Ghezzi, Mariateresa Maggiolino

mariateresa maggiolino

The recent analysis developed by professor William H. Page on the US notion of concerted actions raised the idea to develop an article that exams in-death the EU meaning of concerned practices and that skein of US doctrines that focus on several phenomena running from facilitating practices to invitations to collude, plus factors and agreements to exchange information. According to professor Page, the current definition of concerted actions misses the opportunity to use inter-firm communications as the discriminating factor between cases of collusive pricing practices and cases of interdependent parallel behaviors that result in the same market price. To the …

Rise Of The Intercontinentalexchange And Implications Of Its Merger With Nyse Euronext, Latoya C. Brown

Latoya C. Brown, Esq.

This paper examines the impending merger between the IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) and NYSE Euronext against the backdrop of the current structure of the global financial services industry. The paper concludes that the merger embodies what the financial services industry is becoming and captures the model that will allow exchanges to remain competitive in today’s marketplace: mega-exchanges with broader asset classes and electronic platforms. As technology and globalization threaten their vitality, exchanges will need to continue reinventing and adapting. Increasingly over the last decade they have done so by merging and by moving, at least a part of, their operations on screen. …

The Regulation Of U.S. Money Market Funds: Lessons From Europe, Latoya C. Brown

Latoya C. Brown, Esq.

The recent financial crisis challenged long held perceptions of money market funds (“MMFs”) as stable and highly liquid instruments. Regulators in the US and in Europe now seek to impose additional rules on MMFs to avoid another significant failure as happened to the Reserve Fund. In the US, the debate is drawing even more media attention as question of which regulatory body - such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Treasury Department, and the Financial Stability Oversight Council – should lead the way has taken interesting twists and turns. This paper examines primary reform options being proposed in the …

Trade Marks: Single Colours Can Be Protected (And Competitors See Red)., Valerio Cosimo Romano

Valerio Cosimo Romano

No abstract provided.

Multisidedness In Ambito Sportivo: Alla Ricerca Di Un Grimaldello Esegetico, Valerio Cosimo Romano, Roberto Pardolesi

Valerio Cosimo Romano

No abstract provided.

The Competition Act Of 2010: What Effect Will The Act Likely Have On The Supply And Prices Of Goods And Services In Malaysia?, Bryane Michael

Bryane Michael (bryane.michael@stcatz.ox.ac.uk)

This presentation provides an overview of the likely effects of Malaysia's 2010 Competition Act.