Registration And Federalization: 75 Years Of The Lanham Act,
2021
UCLA School of Law
Registration And Federalization: 75 Years Of The Lanham Act, Mark P. Mckenna, Brittany Von Rueden
Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal
The Lanham Act, enacted 75 years ago, aimed to enhance notice and uniformity in trademark law, primarily through improved registration processes. However, its goals were only partially met. While it successfully federalized trademark law, it fell short in emphasizing registration due to court interpretations that allowed enforcement of unregistered marks, leading to a more complex and expanded scope of trademark protection.
Mark Talk,
2021
University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law
Mark Talk, Alexandra J. Roberts
Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal
The article argues that trademark law should evolve to incorporate "mark talk"—consumer discussions and usage of trademarks on social media and online platforms—as a key factor in determining secondary meaning. Traditional methods, such as advertising expenditures and sales data, are critiqued for their limitations in the digital age. The author advocates for updating legal frameworks to reflect contemporary consumer interactions, emphasizing that mark talk provides direct evidence of consumer perception and a mark's distinctiveness. However, courts and the USPTO have been slow to adopt these modern approaches, highlighting a disconnect between legal practices and the realities of digital communication.
Antitrust's High-Tech Exceptionalism,
2021
Vanderbilt University Law School
Antitrust's High-Tech Exceptionalism, Rebecca H. Allensworth
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
American competition policy has four big problems: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. These companies each reign over a sector of the digital marketplace, controlling both the consumer experience and the possibility of competitive entry. This Essay argues that the conventional account of how antitrust law allowed this consolidation of market power - that it failed to evolve to address the market realities of the technology sector-is incomplete. Not only did courts fail to adapt antitrust law from its smoke-stack roots, but they gave big tech special dispensation under traditional antitrust doctrine. Swayed by prevailing utopic views about digital markets in …
Is It Really A #Ad? An Increase In Rising Influencers Posting Fake Sponsored Content,
2021
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
Is It Really A #Ad? An Increase In Rising Influencers Posting Fake Sponsored Content, Amanda Guzman
Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal
No abstract provided.
"Gigi, Over Here!": Celebrity Use Of Copyrighted Paparazzi Photographs,
2021
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
"Gigi, Over Here!": Celebrity Use Of Copyrighted Paparazzi Photographs, Dylan B. Reich
Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal
The note argues that celebrities should have limited rights to use paparazzi-taken photos of themselves, balancing their rights with those of photographers. It proposes that non-commercial use by celebrities could be permissible under certain legal doctrines.
Do Legal Origins Predict Legal Substance?,
2021
Columbia Law School
Do Legal Origins Predict Legal Substance?, Anu Bradford, Yun-Chien Chang, Adam S. Chilton, Nuno Garoupa
Faculty Scholarship
There is a large body of research in economics and law suggesting that the legal origin of a country – that is, whether its legal regime is based on English common law or French, German, or Nordic civil law – profoundly impacts a range of outcomes. However, the exact relationship between legal origin and legal substance has been disputed in the literature and not fully explored with nuanced legal coding. We revisit this debate while leveraging novel cross-country data sets that provide detailed coding of two areas of laws: property and antitrust. We find that having shared legal origins strongly …
Apple Inc. V. Pepper:The Future Of Software-Based Retail—Incalculable Damages And Duplicitous Liability,
2021
University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law
Apple Inc. V. Pepper:The Future Of Software-Based Retail—Incalculable Damages And Duplicitous Liability, Christopher Derian
Journal of Business & Technology Law
No abstract provided.
Requiem For A Lightweight: How Ncaa Continues To Distort Antitrust Doctrine,
2021
William & Mary Law School
Requiem For A Lightweight: How Ncaa Continues To Distort Antitrust Doctrine, Alan J. Meese
Faculty Publications
The Supreme Court speaks rarely about the meaning of the Sherman Act. When the Court does speak, its pronouncements have particular resonance and staying power among jurists, scholars, and enforcers. NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma was such a case. There the Court assessed agreements reducing the output and increasing the prices of televised college football games. After announcing that restraints imposed by sports leagues are exempt from per se condemnation, the Court went on to invalidate the challenged agreements under the rule of reason because they produced significant economic harm without offsetting benefits. In so …
Poaching,
2021
American University Washington College of Law
Poaching, Charles A. Sullivan
American University Law Review
The last few years have seen the beginnings of what could become a radical revision of the law’s approach to restraints on competition in the labor market. While most attention has been focused on “noncompetes”—agreements between employers and their employees imposing postemployment restraints—there has also been a revival of interest in so-called “no-poaches”—agreements by which employers restrict their ability to hire each other’s workers. This new interest includes antitrust challenges and an enhanced skepticism by common law courts about enforcing such agreements. Indeed, as new laws increasingly limit the use of traditional noncompetes, no-poaches have become more attractive to employers …
Vertical Mergers In A Model Of Upstream Monopoly And Incomplete Information,
2021
Charles River Associates (CRA)
Vertical Mergers In A Model Of Upstream Monopoly And Incomplete Information, Serge Moresi, David Reitman, Steven C. Salop, Yianis Sarafidis
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
We examine the role of private information on the impact of vertical mergers. A vertical merger can improve the information that is available to an upstream monopolist because, after the merger, the monopolist can observe the cost of its downstream merger partner. In the pre-merger world, because the costs of the downstream firms are private information, the monopolist has incomplete information and cannot implement the monopoly outcome: The expected pre-merger equilibrium price of the downstream product is lower than the monopoly price. After a vertical merger, the equilibrium input price that is charged to the downstream rival can either increase …
Blockchain Neutrality,
2021
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
Blockchain Neutrality, Samuel N. Weinstein
Articles
Blockchain technology is transforming how markets work. Blockchains eliminate the need for trusted gatekeepers like banks to execute, verify, and record transactions. In the financial markets, their disruptive potential threatens both Wall Street banks and Silicon Valley venture capitalists. How blockchain technology is regulated will determine whether it encourages or inhibits competition. Some blockchain applications present serious fraud and systemic risks, complicating regulation. This Article explores the antitrust and competition policy challenges blockchain presents and proposes a regulatory strategy, modeled on Internet regulation and net neutrality principles, to unlock blockchain’s competitive potential. It contends that financial regulators should promote blockchain …
Oligopoly Coordination, Economic Analysis, And The Prophylactic Role Of Horizontal Merger Enforcement,
2021
American University Washington College of Law
Oligopoly Coordination, Economic Analysis, And The Prophylactic Role Of Horizontal Merger Enforcement, Jonathan Baker
Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals
For decades, the major United States airlines have raised passenger fares through coordinated fare-setting when their route networks overlap, according to the United States Department of Justice. Through its review of company documents and testimony, the Justice Department found that when major airlines have overlapping route networks, they respond to rivals’ price changes across multiple routes and thereby discourage competition from their rivals. A recent empirical study reached a similar conclusion: It found that fares have increased for this reason on more than 1000 routes nationwide and even that American and Delta, two airlines with substantial route overlaps, have come …
Regulating Antitrust Through Trade Agreements,
2021
Columbia Law School
Regulating Antitrust Through Trade Agreements, Anu Bradford, Adam S. Chilton
Faculty Scholarship
Antitrust law is one of the most commonly deployed instruments of economic regulation around the world. To date, over 130 countries have adopted a domestic antitrust law. These countries comprise developed and developing nations alike, and combined produce over 95 percent of the world’s GDP. Most of the countries that have adopted an antitrust law have done so since 1990. This period of significant proliferation of antitrust laws also coincides with a notable expansion of international trade agreements, including the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 and the negotiation of numerous bilateral and multilateral trade agreements. These …
Plurilateral Cooperation As An Alternative To Trade Agreements: Innovating One Domain At A Time,
2021
European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS)
Plurilateral Cooperation As An Alternative To Trade Agreements: Innovating One Domain At A Time, Bernard M. Hoekman, Charles F. Sabel
Faculty Scholarship
At the end of 2017 different groups of WTO members decided to launch talks on four subjects, setting aside the WTO consensus working practice. This paper argues that these ‘joint statement initiatives’ (JSIs) should seek to establish open plurilateral agreements (OPAs) even in instances where the outcome can be incorporated into existing schedules of commitments of participating WTO members. Designing agreements as OPAs provides an institutional framework for collaboration among the responsible national authorities, transparency, mutual review and learning, as well as alternatives to default WTO dispute settlement procedures which may not be appropriate for supporting cooperation on the matters …
The Easterbrook Theorem: An Application To Digital Markets,
2021
Texas A&M University School of Law
The Easterbrook Theorem: An Application To Digital Markets, Joshua D. Wright, Murat C. Mungan
Faculty Scholarship
The rise of large firms in the digital economy, including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, has rekindled the debate about monopolization law. There are proposals to make finding liability easier against alleged digital monopolists by relaxing substantive standards; to flip burdens of proof; and to overturn broad swaths of existing Supreme Court precedent, and even to condemn a law review article. Frank Easterbrook’s seminal 1984 article, The Limits of Antitrust, theorizes that Type I error costs are greater than Type II error costs in the antitrust context, a proposition that has been woven deeply into antitrust law by the Supreme …
Two Politicizations Of U.S. Antitrust Law,
2020
Brooklyn Law School
Two Politicizations Of U.S. Antitrust Law, Frank Pasquale, Jacqueline Green
Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law
Critics have accused the Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) and Trump-appointee-chaired Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of populism, deviating from the more technocratic standards that governed agency interventions during the Bush and Obama eras. The broad brush of politicization has been applied to the administration's handling of a wide variety of topics, ranging from marijuana and media mergers, to landmark lawsuits against Google and Facebook. But a more discerning eye is necessary here. The concept of the political has both authoritarian and democratic registers. The federal Google and Facebook antitrust cases reflected the democratization of high technology antitrust. Meanwhile, troublingly authoritarian …
The Political Face Of Antitrust,
2020
Brooklyn Law School
The Political Face Of Antitrust, Spencer Weber Waller, Jacob E. Morse
Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law
The last twenty years have brought antitrust back to the fore as a political issue of greater salience. Several booms and busts in the economy have highlighted the issue of corporate power in the economy and the political system. The growing influence and aggressiveness of the European Union and other jurisdictions’ competition laws have highlighted the relative retreat in the United States. Political movements in the United States have brought issues of corporate power and its abuse back into the public limelight and with them a greater political salience for antitrust in the election cycle of 2020.
Symposium: Consumer Welfare Market Structure And Political Power,
2020
Brooklyn Law School
Symposium: Consumer Welfare Market Structure And Political Power, Edward J. Janger
Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law
Two competing visions dominate the fields of antitrust and consumer protection: neo-liberal and progressive. The neo-classical approach is associated with Robert Bork and the Law and Economics Movement. The progressive strand is older, identified with Brandeis and early 20th Century social reform. As a matter of chronology the Brandeisian view dominated into the 1970s, but from 1980, until recently, the Borkian law and economics approach has been in ascendancy in Congress, the academy, and in the courts. Technological change and events in the broader economy have caused the politics and the academic focus to shift. The financial crisis of 2008-09 …
A History Of Consumer Class Actions In State Courts,
2020
Brooklyn Law School
A History Of Consumer Class Actions In State Courts, Anne Fleming
Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law
Most historians date the “modern” class action to the 1966 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Yet, the class action or “representative suit” has a longer, unexplored history in the state courts. In the late 1930s and 1940s, a group of scrappy, first-generation lawyers tried to build their businesses by aggregating the small-sum claims of many consumers. The defendants in these cases were, for example, lenders who failed to comply with the technicalities of state disclosure mandates, and utility companies that charged consumers extra fees. Each consumer’s claim was small, but, as a group, the claims could yield …
Does The Ftc Have Blood On Its Hands? An Analysis Of Ftc Overreach And Abuse Of Power After Liu,
2020
University of Michigan Law School
Does The Ftc Have Blood On Its Hands? An Analysis Of Ftc Overreach And Abuse Of Power After Liu, Angel Reyes, Benjamin Hunter
Buffalo Law Review
Recent cases have called the Federal Trade Commission’s (“FTC”) enforcement methods into question. After a circuit split developed in the wake of the Seventh Circuit’s decision in Federal Trade Commission v. Credit Bureau Center, L.L.C., the Supreme Court responded by granting certiorari and consolidating the case with AMG Capital Management, L.L.C. v. Federal Trade Commission. The issue in these cases is whether Section 13(b) of the FTC Act authorizes the FTC to bypass the due process safeguards mandated by Congress in Sections 5 and 19 of the FTC Act and, in doing so, to conduct warrantless searches and seizures, unilaterally …
