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Full-Text Articles in Law
Competition And Congestion In Trademark Law, Christopher Buccafusco, Jonathan S. Masur, Mark P. Mckenna
Competition And Congestion In Trademark Law, Christopher Buccafusco, Jonathan S. Masur, Mark P. Mckenna
Faculty Scholarship
Trademark law exists to promote competition. If consumers know which companies make which products, they can more easily find the products they actually want to purchase. Trademark law has long treated “source significance”—the fact that a particular trademark is identified with a particular producer—as both necessary and sufficient for establishing a valid trademark. That is, trademark law has traditionally viewed source significance as the only necessary precondition for a trademark being pro-competitive. In this Article, we argue that this equation of source significance and pro-competitiveness is misguided. Some marks use words that are so closely connected with the product being …
Competition And Innovation: The Breakup Of Ig Farben, Felix Poege
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 …
Intellectual Property Experimentalism By Way Of Competition Law, Tim Wu
Intellectual Property Experimentalism By Way Of Competition Law, Tim Wu
Faculty Scholarship
Competition law and Intellectual Property have divergent intellectual cultures – the former more pragmatic and experimentalist; the latter influenced by natural law and vested rights. The US Supreme Court decision in Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis is an intellectual victory for the former approach, one that suggests that antitrust law can and should be used to introduce greater scrutiny of the specific consequences of intellectual property grants.
Ip Injury And The Institutions Of Patent Law, Paul Gugliuzza
Ip Injury And The Institutions Of Patent Law, Paul Gugliuzza
Faculty Scholarship
This paper reviews Creation Without Restraint: Promoting Liberty and Rivalry in Innovation, the pathbreaking book by Christina Bohannan and Herbert Hovenkamp (Oxford Univ. Press 2012). The Review begins by summarizing the book’s descriptive insights and analyzing one of its important normative proposals: the adoption of an IP injury requirement. This requirement would demand that infringement plaintiffs prove -- before obtaining damages or an injunction -- an injury to the incentive to innovate. After explaining how this requirement is easy to justify under governing law and is largely consistent with recent Supreme Court decisions in the field of patent law, the …
Rand Patents And Exclusion Orders: Submission Of 19 Economics And Law Professors To The International Trade Commission, Arti K. Rai
Faculty Scholarship
In this comment to ITC Investigation 337-TA-745 (Certain Wireless Communication Devices, Motorola v. Apple) we, as teachers and scholars of economics, antitrust and intellectual property, remedies, administrative, and international intellectual property law, former Department of Justice lawyers and chief economists, a former executive official at the Patent and Trademark Office, a former counsel at the ITC Office of the General Counsel, and a former Member of the President’s Council of Economic Adviser take the position that ITC exclusion orders generally should not be granted under § 1337(d)(1) on the basis of patents subject to obligations to license on “reasonable and …
Patent Settlements, Risk, And Competition, Mark R. Patterson
Patent Settlements, Risk, And Competition, Mark R. Patterson
Faculty Scholarship
PowerPoint presentation delivered at the session, Patent Settlements: The Issues Beyond the "Reverse Payment" Cases at the ABA 59th Annual Antitrust Spring Meeting, March 30, 2011.
The Lawful Acquisition And Exercise Of Monopoly Power And Its Implications For The Objectives Of Antitrust, Keith N. Hylton, David S. Evans
The Lawful Acquisition And Exercise Of Monopoly Power And Its Implications For The Objectives Of Antitrust, Keith N. Hylton, David S. Evans
Faculty Scholarship
The antitrust laws of the United States have, from their inception, allowed firms to acquire significant market power, to charge prices that reflect that market power, and to enjoy supra-competitive returns. This article shows that this policy, which was established by the U.S. Congress and affirmed repeatedly by the U.S. courts, reflects a tradeoff between the dynamic benefits that society realizes from allowing firms to secure significant rewards, including monopoly profits, from making risky investments and engaging in innovation; and the static costs that society incurs when firms with significant market power raise price and curtail output. That tradeoff results …
Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale
Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale
Faculty Scholarship
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 …
Asymmetric Market Failure And Prisoner's Dilemma In Intellectual Property, Wendy J. Gordon
Asymmetric Market Failure And Prisoner's Dilemma In Intellectual Property, Wendy J. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
When competitors engage in unrestrained copying of each others' intangible products, the structure can resemble a prisoner's dilemma in which free choice leads to unnecessarily low individual payoffs and low social welfare. There are many ways to avoid these low payoffs, such as contract enforcement, direct regulation of copying behavior through IP, and direct government subsidies. All of these modes alter the payoff pattern away from prisoner's dilemma.
When should lawmakers place copyright law or other IP law among the prime options to consider?
Because copyright, patent, misappropriation and the like all work through private-property markets, one key is to …