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Econometric Analysis In Ftc V. Staples, Jonathan Baker
Econometric Analysis In Ftc V. Staples, Jonathan Baker
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
In mid-1997, a federal district court in Washington, DC, granted the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC's) request for a preliminary injunction blocking the proposed merger of Staples and Office Depot (Federal Trade Commission v. Staples, Inc. [hereafter, Staples] 1997a). The transaction would have combined two of the nation's three leading office superstore chains. The firms chose not to pursue the case further after the preliminary injunction was issued, thus giving up on their efforts to merge.
When Is Property Intellectual: The Leveraging Problem Essays, Mark R. Patterson
When Is Property Intellectual: The Leveraging Problem Essays, Mark R. Patterson
Faculty Scholarship
Patents and copyrights protect inventions and expression; they do not protect products. This distinction, I argue in this essay, is a key to the antitrust problem of the "leveraging" of intellectual property. In a typical leveraging case, the manufacturer of a durable good, like a copier or computer, refuses to sell replacement parts for its equipment unless the purchaser also hires the manufacturer to service the equipment. Such a practice can be illegal under antitrust law, but when the leveraging products-in this example, replacement parts-are protected by patent or copyright, the manufacturer will often claim that the leveraging is a …