This Cambridge Handbook, edited by Roger D. Blair and D. Daniel Sokol, brings together a group of world-renowned professors in the fields of law and economics to assess the theory and practice of antitrust, intellectual property, and high tech. With the increased globalization of antitrust, a better understanding of how law and economics shape this interface will help academics, policymakers, and practitioners to understand the existing state of academic literature, its limits, and its relevance to real-world antitrust. The book will be an essential resource for anyone seeking to understand academic and policy considerations shaping the world of antitrust, intellectual property, and high tech.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
The most important book on antitrust ever written. It shows how antitrust suits adversely affect the consumer by encouraging a costly form of protection for inefficient and uncompetitive small businesses.
This book anticipates virtually every antitrust issue you can expect to face, including: horizontal and vertical restraints; joint ventures; private treble damage actions; price fixing; and more.
In modern markets innovation is at least as great a concern as price competition. The book discusses how antitrust policy and patent and copyright laws interact to create market dynamics that affect both competition and innovation. Antitrust and intellectual property policies for the most part are complementary, sharing common goals of promoting innovation and economic welfare. In some cases, however, their distinct approaches, one based on competition and the other on exclusion, come into conflict. As antitrust authorities focus increasingly on ensuring that firms do not interfere with innovation by rivals or impede the pace of technological progress in an industry, they necessarily must confront difficult questions about the strength and scope of intellectual property rights. When should private property rights give way to public competition objectives? When is it appropriate to remedy anticompetitive outcomes through access to protected intellectual property? How does antitrust enforcement or competition itself affect incentives to innovate? Leading economists and lawyers address these questions from both US and EU perspectives in discussing salient antitrust cases involving intellectual property rights such as Microsoft, Magill, Kodak, IMS and Intel.
This open access edited book captures the complexities and conflicts arising at the interface of intellectual property rights (IPR) and competition law. To do so, it discusses four specific themes: (a) policies governing functioning of standard setting organizations (SSOs), transparency and incentivising future innovation; (b) issue of royalties for standard essential patents (SEPs) and related disputes; (c) due process principles, procedural fairness and best practices in competition law; and (d) coherence of patent policies and consonance with competition law to support innovation in new technologies. Many countries have formulated policies and re-oriented their economies to foster technological innovation as it is seen as a major source of economic growth. At the same time, there have been tensions between patent laws and competition laws, despite the fact that both are intended to enhance consumer welfare. In this regard, licensing of SEPs has been debated extensively, although in most instances, innovators and implementers successfully negotiate licensing of SEPs. However, there have been instances where disagreements on royalty base and royalty rates, terms of licensing, bundling of patents in licenses, pooling of licenses have arisen, and this has resulted in a surge of litigation in various jurisdictions and also drawn the attention of competition/anti-trust regulators. Further, a lingering lack of consensus among scholars, industry experts and regulators regarding solutions and techniques that are apposite in these matters across jurisdictions has added to the confusion. This book looks at the processes adopted by the competition/anti-trust regulators to apply the principles of due process and procedural fairness in investigating abuse of dominance cases against innovators.
The presence of a robust public domain is an essential precondition for cultural, social and economic development and for a healthy democratic process. But the public domain is under pressure as a result of the ongoing march towards an information economy. Items of information, which in the `old economy had little or no economic value, such as factual data, personal data, genetic information and pure ideas, have acquired independent economic value in the current information age, and consequently become the object of property rights making the information a tradable commodity. How and to what extent does the commodification of information affect the free flow of information and the integrity of the public domain? Does the freedom of expression and information, guaranteed inter alia in the European Convention on Human Rights, call for active state intervention to `save the public domain? What means both legal and practical are available or might be conceived to guarantee and foster a robust public domain? These were the main questions that were addressed in a major collaborative research project led by the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam (IViR) in co-operation with the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society (TILT) of Tilburg University, and funded by ITeR, the Dutch National Program for Information Technology and Law. Thirteen contributions from academia worldwide make up the present book, addressing the future of the public domain from a different angle. In addition, all authors were invited to reflect upon the notion and role of the public domain in the context of information law and policy. Should this concept be limited to that of a `negative image of (intellectual) property protection, i.e. all publicly available information not subject to a property right, and therefore freely (i.e. gratis) available, or should a broader approach be taken, e.g. all information available from public sources at affordable cost? Should information policies be aimed at maximizing the public domain or optimizing information flows? To what extent are these aims congruent? This book takes a broader, `information law oriented approach towards the question of preserving the public domain, in which a wide range of interrelated legal questions converge. Issues treated in this book include: Economic analysis of the public domain Fundamental rights analysis of the public domain Impact of the application of technological protection measures and contractual restrictions on the public domain The impact of the expansion of copyright, database right and patent rights on the public domain The impact of the commodification of private data, government information, indigenous knowledge on the public domain The capacity of the Open Source and Creative Commons Movements to preserve the integrity of the public domain The Future of the Public Domain is an important work for all those interested or involved in the regulation of the knowledge economy. Legal scholars, academic and research institutions, corporate counsel, lawyers, government policymakers and regulators all these and more will benefit enormously from the thoughtful and incisive discussions presented here.
Imagine sending a magazine article to 10 friends-making photocopies, putting them in envelopes, adding postage, and mailing them. Now consider how much easier it is to send that article to those 10 friends as an attachment to e-mail. Or to post the article on your own site on the World Wide Web. The ease of modifying or copying digitized material and the proliferation of computer networking have raised fundamental questions about copyright and patentâ€"intellectual property protections rooted in the U.S. Constitution. Hailed for quick and convenient access to a world of material, the Internet also poses serious economic issues for those who create and market that material. If people can so easily send music on the Internet for free, for example, who will pay for music? This book presents the multiple facets of digitized intellectual property, defining terms, identifying key issues, and exploring alternatives. It follows the complex threads of law, business, incentives to creators, the American tradition of access to information, the international context, and the nature of human behavior. Technology is explored for its ability to transfer content and its potential to protect intellectual property rights. The book proposes research and policy recommendations as well as principles for policymaking.
In Antitrust Law and Intellectual Property Rights: Cases and Materials, Christopher R. Leslie describes how patents, copyrights, and trademarks confer exclusionary rights on their owners, and how firms sometimes exercise this exclusionary power in ways that exceed the legitimate bounds of their intellectual property rights. Leslie explains that while substantive intellectual property law defines the scope of the exclusionary rights, antitrust law often provides the most important consequences when owners of intellectual property misuse their rights in a way that harms consumers or illegitimately excludes competitors. Antitrust law defines the limits of what intellectual property owners can do with their IP rights. In this book, Leslie explores what conduct firms can and cannot engage in while acquiring and exploiting their intellectual property rights, and surveys those aspects of antitrust law that are necessary for both antitrust practitioners and intellectual property attorneys to understand. This book is ideal for an advanced antitrust course in a JD program. In addition to building on basic antitrust concepts, it fills in a gap that is often missing in basic antitrust courses yet critical for an intellectual property lawyer: the intersection of intellectual property and antitrust law. The relationship between intellectual property and antitrust is particularly valuable as an increasing number of law schools offer specializations and LLMs in intellectual property. This book also provides meaningful material for both undergraduate and graduate business schools programs because it explains how antitrust law limits the marshalling of intellectual property rights.
This book takes a fresh look at the most dynamic area of American law today, comprising the fields of copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrecy, publicity rights, and misappropriation. Topics range from copyright in private letters to defensive patenting of business methods, from moral rights in the visual arts to the banking of trademarks, from the impact of the court of patent appeals to the management of Mickey Mouse. The history and political science of intellectual property law, the challenge of digitization, the many statutes and judge-made doctrines, and the interplay with antitrust principles are all examined. The treatment is both positive (oriented toward understanding the law as it is) and normative (oriented to the reform of the law). Previous analyses have tended to overlook the paradox that expanding intellectual property rights can effectively reduce the amount of new intellectual property by raising the creators' input costs. Those analyses have also failed to integrate the fields of intellectual property law. They have failed as well to integrate intellectual property law with the law of physical property, overlooking the many economic and legal-doctrinal parallels. This book demonstrates the fundamental economic rationality of intellectual property law, but is sympathetic to critics who believe that in recent decades Congress and the courts have gone too far in the creation and protection of intellectual property rights. Table of Contents: Introduction 1. The Economic Theory of Property 2. How to Think about Copyright 3. A Formal Model of Copyright 4. Basic Copyright Doctrines 5. Copyright in Unpublished Works 6. Fair Use, Parody, and Burlesque 7. The Economics of Trademark Law 8. The Optimal Duration of Copyrights and Trademarks 9. The Legal Protection of Postmodern Art 10. Moral Rights and the Visual Artists Rights Act 11. The Economics of Patent Law 12. The Patent Court: A Statistical Evaluation 13. The Economics of Trade Secrecy Law 14. Antitrust and Intellectual Property 15. The Political Economy of Intellectual Property Law Conclusion Acknowledgments Index Reviews of this book: Chicago law professor William Landes and his polymath colleague Richard Posner have produced a fascinating new book...[The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law] is a broad-ranging analysis of how intellectual property should and does work...Shakespeare's copying from Plutarch, Microsoft's incentives to hide the source code for Windows, and Andy Warhol's right to copyright a Brillo pad box as art are all analyzed, as is the question of the status of the all-bran cereal called 'All-Bran.' --Nicholas Thompson, New York Sun Reviews of this book: Landes and Posner, each widely respected in the intersection of law and economics, investigate the right mix of protection and use of intellectual property (IP)...This volume provides a broad and coherent approach to the economics and law of IP. The economics is important, understandable, and valuable. --R. A. Miller, Choice Intellectual property is the most important public policy issue that most policymakers don't yet get. It is America's most important export, and affects an increasingly wide range of social and economic life. In this extraordinary work, two of America's leading scholars in the law and economics movement test the pretensions of intellectual property law against the rationality of economics. Their conclusions will surprise advocates from both sides of this increasingly contentious debate. Their analysis will help move the debate beyond the simplistic ideas that now tend to dominate. --Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School, author of The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World An image from modern mythology depicts the day that Einstein, pondering a blackboard covered with sophisticated calculations, came to the life-defining discovery: Time = $$. Landes and Posner, in the role of that mythological Einstein, reveal at every turn how perceptions of economic efficiency pervade legal doctrine. This is a fascinating and resourceful book. Every page reveals fresh, provocative, and surprising insights into the forces that shape law. --Pierre N. Leval, Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit The most important book ever written on intellectual property. --William Patry, former copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, Judiciary Committee Given the immense and growing importance of intellectual property to modern economies, this book should be welcomed, even devoured, by readers who want to understand how the legal system affects the development, protection, use, and profitability of this peculiar form of property. The book is the first to view the whole landscape of the law of intellectual property from a functionalist (economic) perspective. Its examination of the principles and doctrines of patent law, copyright law, trade secret law, and trademark law is unique in scope, highly accessible, and altogether greatly rewarding. --Steven Shavell, Harvard Law School, author of Foundations of Economic Analysis of Law
