Law Commons^™

Patent Exclusions And Antitrust After Therasense, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

A patent may be held invalid if it was obtained by “inequitable conduct” before the PTO during the process of patent prosecution. In its Therasense decision the Federal Circuit imposed severe requirements against those attempting to defend against a patent on the basis of inequitable conduct, insisting that inequitable conduct be measured essentially by a subjective test. Objective “reasonable person” tests such as negligence or even gross negligence will not suffice. By contrast, the Supreme Court has insisted that the conduct giving rise to a wrongful infringement action violating the antitrust laws be initially based on an objective test – …

Competition For Innovation, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Both antitrust and IP law are limited and imperfect instruments for regulating innovation. The problems include high information costs and lack of sufficient knowledge, special interest capture, and the jury trial system, to name a few. More fundamentally, antitrust law and intellectual property law have looked at markets in very different ways. Further, over the last three decades antitrust law has undergone a reformation process that has made it extremely self conscious about its goals. While the need for such reform is at least as apparent in patent and copyright law, very little true reform has actually occurred.

Antitrust has …

Innovation And Competition Policy, Ch. 9 (2d Ed): The Innovation Commons, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

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 …

Distributive Justice And Consumer Welfare In Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

The dominant view of antitrust policy in the United States is that it is intended to promote some version of economic welfare. More specifically, antitrust promotes allocative efficiency by ensuring that markets are as competitive as they can practicably be, and that firms do not face unreasonable roadblocks to attaining productive efficiency, which refers to both cost minimization and innovation.

The distribution concern that has dominated debates over United States antitrust policy over the last several decades is whether antitrust should adopt a “consumer welfare” principle rather than a more general neoclassical “total welfare” principle. In The Antitrust Paradox Robert …

Constitutionally Tailoring Punishment, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Since the turn of the century, the Supreme Court has begun to regulate non-capital sentencing under the Sixth Amendment in the Apprendi line of cases (requiring jury findings of fact to justify sentence enhancements) as well as under the Eighth Amendment in the Miller and Graham line of cases (forbidding mandatory life imprisonment for juvenile defendants). Though both lines of authority sound in individual rights, in fact they are fundamentally about the structures of criminal justice. These two seemingly disparate lines of doctrine respond to structural imbalances in non-capital sentencing by promoting morally appropriate punishment judgments that are based on …

Anticompetitive Patent Settlements And The Supreme Court's Actavis Decision, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

In FTC v. Actavis the Supreme Court held that settlement of a patent infringement suit in which the patentee of a branded pharmaceutical drug pays a generic infringer to stay out of the market may be illegal under the antitrust laws. Justice Breyer's majority opinion was surprisingly broad, in two critical senses. First, he spoke with a generality that reached far beyond the pharmaceutical generic drug disputes that have provoked numerous pay-for-delay settlements.

Second was the aggressive approach that the Court chose. The obvious alternatives were the rule that prevailed in most Circuits, that any settlement is immune from antitrust …

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

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

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 …

Innovation And Competition Policy, Chapter 8 (2d Ed): Innovation, Ip Rights, And Anticompetitive Exclusion, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

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 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 will be updated frequently. The author uses …

Resource Movement And The Legal System, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

In "The Problem of Social Cost" Ronald Coase considered several common law disputes among neighbors whose economic activities conflicted with one another. For example, Sturges v. Bridgman was a nineteenth century nuisance case involving a pediatrician whose practice was hindered by his neighbor, a confectioner whose operation required a noisy mechanical mortar & pestle. Coase showed that if high transaction costs did not interfere, private bargaining would provide a solution which he characterized as efficient -- namely, that the right to continue would be given to the person who valued it most. For example, if the pediatrician valued the right …

Migrant Workers’ Access To Justice At Home: Indonesia, Bassina Farbenblum, Eleanor Taylor-Nicholson, Sarah Paoletti

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Each year, around half a million Indonesians travel abroad to work, half of those to the Middle East. They are typically women from small cities or villages with primary education and limited work experience, hired to perform domestic work. Many suffer abuse and exploitation but have virtually no access to recourse within their host country’s legal system.

The vulnerability of migrant workers abroad makes it crucial for them to be able to seek redress in their own countries. Access to justice at home also allows for redress when home governments and private recruitment businesses breach their legal responsibilities to migrant …

Activating Actavis, Aaron Edlin, C. Scott Hemphill, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Carl Shapiro

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

In Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, Inc., the Supreme Court provided fundamental guidance about how courts should handle antitrust challenges to reverse payment patent settlements. The Court came down strongly in favor of an antitrust solution to the problem, concluding that “an antitrust action is likely to prove more feasible administratively than the Eleventh Circuit believed.” At the same time, Justice Breyer’s majority opinion acknowledged that the Court did not answer every relevant question. The opinion closed by “leav[ing] to the lower courts the structuring of the present rule-of-reason antitrust litigation.”

This article is an effort to help courts and …

Private Enforcement, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang, Herbert Kritzer

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Our aim in this Article is to advance understanding of private enforcement of statutory and administrative law in the United States and to raise questions that will be useful to those who are concerned with regulatory design in other countries. To that end, we briefly discuss aspects of American culture, history, and political institutions that reasonably can be thought to have contributed to the growth and subsequent development of private enforcement. We also set forth key elements of the general legal landscape in which decisions about private enforcement are made, aspects of which should be central to the choice of …

Can Pensions Be Restructured In (Detroit’S) Municipal Bankruptcy?, David A. Skeel Jr.

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

This paper, which was written as a White Paper for the Federalist Society, describes and assesses the question whether public employee pensions can be restructured in bankruptcy, with a particular focus on Detroit. Part I gives a brief overview both of the treatment of pensions under state law, and of the Michigan law governing the Detroit pensions. Part II explains the legal argument for restructuring an underfunded pension in bankruptcy. Part III considers the major federal constitutional objections to restructuring, Part IV discusses arguments based on the Michigan Constitution, and Part V assesses several Chapter 9 arguments against restructuring. None …

Coase, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

This brief essay considers the career, contributions, and influence of Ronald Coase, who passed away in September, 2013. Comments are welcome.

Institutional Advantage In Competition And Innovation Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

In the United States responsibility for innovation policy and competition policy are assigned to different agencies with different authority. The principal institutional enforcers of patent policy are the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the International Trade Commission (ITC), and the federal district courts as overseen by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and ultimately the Supreme Court. While competition policy is not an explicit part of patent policy, competition issues arise frequently, even when they are not seen as such.

Since early in the twentieth century antitrust courts have had to confront practices that …

Chapter 8: Secondary-Line Differential Pricing And The Robinson-Patman Act, E. Thomas Sullivan, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Howard A. Shelanski, Christopher R. Leslie

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Because it is taught infrequently, the full text of Chapter 8 of our antitrust casebook, on the Robinson-Patman Act, is now posted online and free for anyone to use. This chapter covers all issues related to secondary-line enforcement, the "cost justification," "meeting competition," and other defenses, as well as buyers' liability. Primary-line enforcement is still covered with the materials on predatory pricing in Chapter 6.

U.C.C. Article 9, Filing-Based Authority, And Fundamental Property Principles: A Reply To Professor Plank, Steven L. Harris, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Uniform Commercial Code Article 9 generally follows the common-law principle that one cannot give rights in property that one does not have (nemo dat quod non habet). In many circumstances, however, Article 9’s priority rules, including its rule awarding priority to the first security interest that is perfected or as to which a financing statement has been filed, trump nemo dat and enable a debtor to grant a senior security interest in property that the debtor previously had encumbered. In this article, Professors Steven Harris and Charles Mooney argue that, properly understood, the first-to-file-or-perfect rule confers upon a debtor the …

Innovation And Competition Policy, Chap. 4 (2nd Ed.): Competition Policy And The Patent System, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

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 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 will be updated frequently. The author uses …

The Taxation Of Cloud Computing And Digital Content, David Shakow

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

“Cloud computing” raises important and difficult questions in state tax law, and for Federal taxes, particularly in the foreign tax area. As cloud computing solutions are adopted by businesses, items we view as tangible are transformed into digital products. In this article, I will describe the problems cloud computing poses for tax systems. I will show how current law is applied to cloud computing and will identify the difficulties current approaches face as they are applied to this developing technology.

My primary interest is how Federal tax law applies to cloud computing, particularly as the new technology affects international transactions. …

Can Consumers Make Affordable Care Affordable? The Value Of Choice Architecture, Eric J. Johnson, Ran Hassin, Tom Baker, Allison T. Bajger, Galen Treuer

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Starting this October, tens of millions will be choosing health coverage on a state or federal health insurance exchange as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. We examine how well people make these choices, how well they think they do, and what can be done to improve these choices. We conducted 6 experiments asking people to choose the most cost-effective policy using websites modeled on current exchanges. Our results suggest there is significant room for improvement. Without interventions, respondents perform at near chance levels and show a significant bias, overweighting out-of-pocket expenses and deductibles. Financial incentives do …

The Duties Of Non-Judicial Actors In Ensuring Competent Negotiation, Stephanos Bibas

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

This essay, written for a symposium at Duquesne Law School entitled Plea Bargaining After Lafler and Frye, offers thoughts on how lawyers could learn from doctors’ experience in catching and preventing medical errors and aviation experts’ learning from airplane crashes and near misses. It also expresses skepticism about the efficacy of judges’ ex post review of ineffective assistance of counsel, but holds out more hope that public-defender organizations, bar associations, probation officers, sentencing judges, sentencing commissions, and line and supervisory prosecutors can do much more to prevent misunderstanding and remedy ineffective bargaining advice in the first place.

Bankruptcy And Economic Recovery, Thomas H. Jackson, David A. Skeel Jr.

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

To measure economic growth or recovery, one traditionally looks to metrics such as the unemployment rate and the growth in GDP. And in terms of figuring out institutional policies that will stimulate economic growth, the focus most often is on policies that encourage investment, entrepreneurial enterprises, and reward risk-taking with appropriate returns. Bankruptcy academics that we are, we tend to add our own area of expertise to this stable— with the firm belief that thinking critically about bankruptcy policy is an important element of any set of institutions designed to speed economic recovery. In this paper, written for a book …

Putting The Trial Penalty On Trial, David S. Abrams

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

The "trial penalty" is a concept widely accepted by all the major actors in the criminal justice system: defendants, prosecutors, defense attorneys, court employees, and judges. The notion is that defendants receive longer sentences at trial than they would have through plea bargain, often substantially longer. The concept is intuitive: longer sentences are necessary in order to induce settlements and without a high settlement rate it would be impossible for courts as currently structured to sustain their immense caseload. While intuitively appealing, this view of the trial penalty is completely at odds with economic prediction. Since both prosecutors and defendants …

Valuation Misstatement Penalties Require Valuation Misstatements, David J. Shakow

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

In this report, I argue that the valuation misstatement penalty has been misinterpreted by the IRS to apply to tax shelter transactions that have nothing to do with valuation. The penalty applies to taxpayers who claim deductions from inflated basis only when the basis was inflated as a result of an overvaluation. Properly understood, the penalty provision rarely raises the issue for which the government successfully sought certiorari in United States v. Woods.

Innovation And Competition Policy, Ch. 10 (2d Ed): Post-Sale And Related Distribution Restraints Involving Ip Rights, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

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 …

Shots For Tots?, Eric A. Feldman

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

By endorsing the use of a vaccine that makes the experience of puffing on a cigarette deeply distasteful, Lieber and Millum have taken the first few tentative steps into a future filled with medical interventions that manipulate individual preferences. It is tempting to embrace the careful arguments of “Preventing Sin” and celebrate the possibility that the profound individual and social costs of smoking will finally be tamed. Yet there is something unsettling about the possibility that parental discretion may be on the cusp of a radical expansion, one that involves a new and unexplored approach to behavior modification.

Innovation And Competition Policy: Cases And Materials (2nd Ed.): Chapter 1: Competition Policy And The Scope Of Intellectual Property Protection, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

This casebook differs from other IP/antitrust casebooks in that it considers sources of competition policy other than 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, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). The book is free for all to use and distribute, subject to restrictions contained in an open source license agreement printed in each chapter. Chapters will be updated frequently. The author uses this …

Innovation And Competition Policy, Ch. 3 (2nd Ed.): Harm To Competition Or Innovation, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

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 …

Innovation And Competition Policy, Ch. 2 (2d Ed): Complementary Products And Processes - The Law Of Tying, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

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 …

Innovation And Competition Policy, Chapter 7 (2d Ed): Intellectual Property Misuse, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

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 …