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Patenting Standards - A Case For Us Antitrust Law Or A Call For Recognizing Immanent Public Policy Limitations To The Exploitation Rights Conferred By The Patent Act?, Apostolos Chronopoulos Nov 2009

Patenting Standards - A Case For Us Antitrust Law Or A Call For Recognizing Immanent Public Policy Limitations To The Exploitation Rights Conferred By The Patent Act?, Apostolos Chronopoulos

Apostolos Chronopoulos

This paper examines the adverse effect of patent ambushing on competitive conditions resulting in the distortion of the standardization process in markets where the effectiveness of competition relies heavily on standardization. The US Rambus litigation serves as a point of departure. In this case, the strategic behavior of the patentee was subjected to both an antitrust and unfair competition analysis. Both approaches display an inadequacy to squarely balance all of the conflicting interests involved. The solution proposed is to apply the patent misuse doctrine as a rule that expresses a public policy defense against patent enforcement so as to ensure …


The Neal Report And The Crisis In Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Mar 2009

The Neal Report And The Crisis In Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

The Neal Report, which was commissioned by Lyndon Johnson and published in 1967, is rightfully criticized for representing the past rather than the future of antitrust. Its authors completely embraced a theory of competition and industrial organization that had dominated American economic thinking for forty years, but was just in the process of coming to an end. The structure-conduct-performance (S-C-P) paradigm that the Neal Report embodied had in fact been one of the most elegant and most tested theories of industrial organization. The theory represented the high point of structuralism in industrial organization economics, resting on the proposition that certain …


The Viability Of Antitrust Price Squeeze Claims, Erik Hovenkamp, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Jan 2009

The Viability Of Antitrust Price Squeeze Claims, Erik Hovenkamp, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

A price squeeze occurs when a vertically integrated firm "squeezes' a rival's margins between a high wholesale price for an essential input sold to the rival, and a low output price to consumers for whom the two firms compete. Price squeezes have been a recognized but controversial antitrust violation for two-thirds of a century. We examine the law and economics of the price squeeze, beginning with Judge Hand's famous discussion in the Alcoa case in 1945. While Alcoa has been widely portrayed as creating a "fairness" or "fair profit" test for unlawful price squeezes, Judge Hand actually adopted a cost-based …


Complex Bundled Discounts And Antitrust Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Erik Hovenkamp Jan 2009

Complex Bundled Discounts And Antitrust Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Erik Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

A bundled discount occurs when a seller conditions a discount or rebate on the buyer's purchaser or two or more different products. Firms that produce fewer than all the good in the bundle find it difficult to compete because they must amortize the discount across a smaller range of goods. For example, if the dominant firm offers a 10% discount for purchase of both good A and good B, but the rival makes only good B, it will have to offer a discount that is large enough to match the dominant firm's B discount as well as the foregone discount …


Solidifying The Defensive Line: The Nfl Network's Current Position Under Antitrust Law And How It Can Be Improved, Ethan Flatt Jan 2009

Solidifying The Defensive Line: The Nfl Network's Current Position Under Antitrust Law And How It Can Be Improved, Ethan Flatt

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

In the United States, the broadcasting of professional sporting events is a multi-billion dollar industry, and the National Football League (NFL) alone earned more than $3 billion from television contracts during its 2008 season. Considering the massive revenues that broadcast rights can generate, it is no surprise that some major professional sports leagues have recently developed their own television networks. While it was not the first league-owned television network, the NFL Network has certainly generated the most attention. Since it started broadcasting a select number of NFL regular season games in 2006, the NFL Network has been subject to media …


Measuring Compliance With Compulsory Licensing Remedies In The American Microsoft Case, William H. Page, Seldon J. Childers Jan 2009

Measuring Compliance With Compulsory Licensing Remedies In The American Microsoft Case, William H. Page, Seldon J. Childers

UF Law Faculty Publications

Section III.E of the final judgments in the American Microsoft case requires Microsoft to make available to software developers certain communications protocols that Windows client operating systems use to interoperate with Microsoft's server operating systems. This provision has been by far the most difficult and costly to implement, primarily because of questions about the quality of Microsoft's documentation of the protocols. The plaintiffs' technical experts, in testing the documentation, have found numerous issues, which they have asked Microsoft to resolve. Because of accumulation of unresolved issues, the parties agreed in 2006 to extend Section III.E for up to five more …


Linkline's Institutional Suspicions, Daniel A. Crane Jan 2009

Linkline's Institutional Suspicions, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Antitrust scholars are having fun again. Not so long ago, they were the poor, redheaded stepchildren of the legal academy, either pining for the older days of rigorous antitrust enforcement or trying to kill off what was left of the enterprise. Other law professors felt sorry for them, ignored them, or both. But now antitrust is making a comeback of sorts. In one heady week in May of 2009, a front-page story in the New York Times reported the dramatic decision of Christine Varney-the Obama Administration's new Antitrust Division head at the Department of Justice-to jettison the entire report on …