Archives For law and economics

Hey Hey! Ho Ho! Partial De Facto Exclusive Dealing Claims Have Got to Go!

Thom Lambert —  27 March 2013

Today, a group of eighteen scholars, of which I am one, filed an amicus brief encouraging the Supreme Court to review a Court of Appeals decision involving loyalty rebates.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit recently upheld an antitrust judgment based on a defendant’s loyalty rebates even though the rebates resulted in above-cost prices for the defendant’s products and could have been matched by an equally efficient rival.  The court did so because it decided that the defendant’s overall selling practices, which involved no exclusivity commitments by buyers, had resulted in “partial de facto exclusive dealing” and thus were not subject to the price-cost test set forth in Brooke Group.  (For the uniniated, Brooke Group immunizes price cuts that result in above-cost prices for the discounter’s goods.)  We amici, who were assembled by Michigan Law’s Dan Crane, believe the Third Circuit’s decision threatens to chill proconsumer discounting practices and should be overruled.

The defendant in the case, Eaton, manufactures transmissions for big trucks (semis, cement trucks, etc.).  So did plaintiff Meritor.  Eaton and Meritor sold their products to the four manufacturers of big trucks.  Those “OEMs” installed the transmissions into the trucks they sold to end-user buyers, who typically customized their trucks and thus could select whatever transmissions they wanted.  Meritor claimed that Eaton drove it from the market by entering into purportedly exclusionary ”long-term agreements” (LTAs) with the four OEMs.  The agreements did not require the OEMs to purchase any particular amount of Eaton’s products, but they did provide the OEMs with rebates (resulting in above-cost prices) if they bought high percentages of their requirements from Eaton.  The agreements also provided that Eaton could terminate the agreements if the market share targets were not met. Each LTA contained a “competitiveness clause” that allowed the OEM to purchase transmissions from another supplier without counting the purchases against the share target, or to terminate the LTA altogether, if another supplier offered a lower price or better product and Eaton could not match that offering.  Following adoption of the LTAs, Eaton’s market share grew, and Meritor’s shrank.  Before withdrawing from the U.S. market altogether, Meritor filed an antitrust action against Eaton.

Eaton insisted, not surprisingly, that it had simply engaged in hard competition.  It grew its market share by offering a lower price that an equally efficient rival could have matched.  Meritor’s failure, then, resulted from either its relative inefficiency or its unwillingness to lower its price to the level of its cost.  By immunizing above-cost discounted prices from liability, the Brooke Group rule permits and encourages the sort of competition in which Eaton engaged, and it should, the company argued, control here.

The Third Circuit disagreed.  This was not, the court said, a simple case of price discounting.  Instead, Eaton had engaged in what the court called “partial de facto exclusive dealing.”  The exclusive dealing was “partial”  because OEMs could purchase some transmissions from other suppliers and still obtain Eaton’s loyalty rebates (i.e., complete exclusivity was not required).  It was “de facto” because purchasing exclusively (or nearly exclusively) from Eaton was not contractually required but was instead simply the precondition for earning a rebate.  Nonetheless, reasoned the court, the gravamen of Meritor’s complaint was some sort of exclusive dealing, which is evaluated not under Brooke Group but instead under a rule of reason that focuses on the degree to which the seller’s practices foreclose its rivals from available sales opportunities.  Under that test, the court concluded, the judgment against Eaton could be upheld.  After all, Eaton’s sales practices won lots of business from Meritor, whose sales eventually shrunk so much that the company exited the market.

As we amici point out in our brief to the Supreme Court, the Third Circuit ignored the fact that it was Eaton’s discounts that led OEMs to buy so much from the company (and forego its rival’s offerings).  Absent an actual promise to buy a high level of one’s requirements from a seller, any “exclusive dealing” resulting from a loyalty rebate scheme results from the fact that buyers voluntarily choose to patronize the seller over its competitors because the discounter’s products are cheaper.  In other words, low pricing is the very means by which any “exclusivity” — and, hence, any market foreclosure — is achieved.  Any claim alleging that an agreement not mandating a certain level of purchases but instead providing for loyalty rebates results in “partial de facto exclusive dealing” is therefore, at its heart, a complaint about price competition.  Accordingly, it should be subject to the Brooke Group screening test for discounts resulting in above-cost pricing.

The Third Circuit wrongly insisted that Eaton had done something more sinister than win business by offering above-cost loyalty rebates.  It concluded that Eaton “essentially forced” the four OEMs (who likely had a good bit of buyer market power themselves) to accept its terms by threatening “financial penalties or supply shortages.”  But these purported “penalties” and threats of “supply shortages” appear nowhere in the record.

The only “penalty” an OEM would have incurred by failing to meet a purchase target is the denial of a rebate from Eaton.  If that’s enough to make Brooke Group inapplicable, then any conditional price cut resulting in an above-cost price falls outside the decision’s safe harbor, for failure to meet the discount condition would subject buyers to a “penalty.”  Proconsumer price competition would surely be chilled by such an evisceration of Brooke Group.  As for threats of supply shortages, the only thing Meritor and the Third Circuit could point to was Eaton’s contractual right to cancel its LTAs if OEMs failed to meet purchase targets.  But if that were enough to make Brooke Group inapplicable, then the decision’s price-cost test could never apply when a dominant seller offers a conditional rebate or discount.  Because the seller could refuse in the future to supply buyers who fail to qualify for the discount, there would be, under the Third Circuit’s reasoning, not just a loyalty rebate but also an implicit threat of “supply shortages” for buyers that fail to meet the seller’s purchase targets.

This is not the first case in which a plaintiff has sought to evade a price-cost test, and thereby impose liability on a discounting scheme that would otherwise pass muster, by seeking to recharacterize the defendant’s conduct.  A few years back, a plaintiff (Masimo) sought to evade the Ninth Circuit’s PeaceHealth decision, which creates a Brooke Group-like safe harbor for certain bundled discounts that could not exclude equally efficient rivals, by construing the defendant’s conduct as “de facto exclusive dealing.”  Dan Crane and I participated as amici in that case as well.

I won’t speak for Dan, but I for one am getting tired of working on these briefs!  It’s time for the Supreme Court to clarify that prevailing price-cost safe harbors cannot be evaded simply through the use of creative labels like “partial de facto exclusive dealing.”  Hopefully, the Court will heed our recommendation that it review — and overrule — the Third Circuit’s Meritor decision.

[In case you're interested, the other scholars signing the brief urging cert in Meritor are Ken Elzinga (Virginia Econ), Richard Epstein (NYU and Chicago Law), Jerry Hausman (MIT Econ), Rebecca Haw (Vanderbilt Law), Herb Hovenkamp (Iowa Law), Glenn Hubbard (Columbia Business), Keith Hylton (Boston U Law), Bill Kovacic (GWU Law), Alan Meese (Wm & Mary Law), Tom Morgan (GWU Law), Barak Orbach (Arizona Law), Bill Page (Florida Law), Robert Pindyck (MIT Econ), Edward Snyder (Yale Mgt), Danny Sokol (Florida Law), and Robert Topel (Chicago Business).]

In antitrust, economics, exclusionary conduct, exclusive dealing, law and economics, monopolization, regulation, Supreme Court
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The SHIELD Act: When Bad Economic Studies Make Bad Laws

Adam Mossoff —  15 March 2013

Earlier this month, Representatives Peter DeFazio and Jason Chaffetz picked up the gauntlet from President Obama’s comments on February 14 at a Google-sponsored Internet Q&A on Google+ that “our efforts at patent reform only went about halfway to where we need to go” and that he would like “to see if we can build some additional consensus on smarter patent laws.” So, Reps. DeFazio and Chaffetz introduced on March 1 the Saving High-tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes (SHIELD) Act, which creates a “losing plaintiff patent-owner pays” litigation system for a single type of patent owner—patent licensing companies that purchase and license patents in the marketplace (and who sue infringers when infringers refuse their requests to license). To Google, to Representative DeFazio, and to others, these patent licensing companies are “patent trolls” who are destroyers of all things good—and the SHIELD Act will save us all from these dastardly “trolls” (is a troll anything but dastardly?).

As I and other scholars have pointed out, the “patent troll” moniker is really just a rhetorical epithet that lacks even an agreed-upon definition.  The term is used loosely enough that it sometimes covers and sometimes excludes universities, Thomas Edison, Elias Howe (the inventor of the lockstitch in 1843), Charles Goodyear (the inventor of vulcanized rubber in 1839), and even companies like IBM.  How can we be expected to have a reasonable discussion about patent policy when our basic terms of public discourse shift in meaning from blog to blog, article to article, speaker to speaker?  The same is true of the new term, “Patent Assertion Entities,” which sounds more neutral, but has the same problem in that it also lacks any objective definition or usage.

Setting aside this basic problem of terminology for the moment, the SHIELD Act is anything but a “smarter patent law” (to quote President Obama). Some patent scholars, like Michael Risch, have begun to point out some of the serious problems with the SHIELD Act, such as its selectively discriminatory treatment of certain types of patent-owners.  Moreover, as Professor Risch ably identifies, this legislation was so cleverly drafted to cover only a limited set of a specific type of patent-owner that it ended up being too clever. Unlike the previous version introduced last year, the 2013 SHIELD Act does not even apply to the flavor-of-the-day outrage over patent licensing companies—the owner of the podcast patent. (Although you wouldn’t know this if you read the supporters of the SHIELD Act like the EFF who falsely claim that this law will stop patent-owners like the podcast patent-owning company.)

There are many things wrong with the SHIELD Act, but one thing that I want to highlight here is that it based on a falsehood: the oft-repeated claim that two Boston University researchers have proven in a study that “patent troll suits cost American technology companies over $29 billion in 2011 alone.”  This is what Rep. DeFazio said when he introduced the SHIELD Act on March 1. This claim was repeated yesterday by House Members during a hearing on “Abusive Patent Litigation.” The claim that patent licensing companies cost American tech companies $29 billion in a single year (2011) has become gospel since this study, The Direct Costs from NPE Disputes, was released last summer on the Internet. (Another name of patent licensing companies is “Non Practicing Entity” or “NPE.”)  A Google search of “patent troll 29 billion” produces 191,000 hits. A Google search of “NPE 29 billion” produces 605,000 hits. Such is the making of conventional wisdom.

The problem with conventional wisdom is that it is usually incorrect, and the study that produced the claim of “$29 billion imposed by patent trolls” is no different. The $29 billion cost study is deeply and fundamentally flawed, as explained by two noted professors, David Schwartz and Jay Kesan, who are also highly regarded for their empirical and economic work in patent law.  In their essay, Analyzing the Role of Non-Practicing Entities in the Patent System, also released late last summer, they detailed at great length serious methodological and substantive flaws in The Direct Costs from NPE Disputes. Unfortunately, the Schwartz and Kesan essay has gone virtually unnoticed in the patent policy debates, while the $29 billion cost claim has through repetition become truth.

In the hope that at least a few more people might discover the Schwartz and Kesan essay, I will briefly summarize some of their concerns about the study that produced the $29 billion cost figure.  This is not merely an academic exercise.  Since Rep. DeFazio explicitly relied on the $29 billion cost claim to justify the SHIELD Act, and he and others keep repeating it, it’s important to know if it is true, because it’s being used to drive proposed legislation in the real world.  If patent legislation is supposed to secure innovation, then it behooves us to know if this legislation is based on actual facts. Yet, as Schwartz and Kesan explain in their essay, the $29 billion cost claim is based on a study that is fundamentally flawed in both substance and methodology.

In terms of its methodological flaws, the study supporting the $29 billion cost claim employs an incredibly broad definition of “patent troll” that covers almost every person, corporation or university that sues someone for infringing a patent that it is not currently being used to manufacture a product at that moment.  While the meaning of the “patent troll” epithet shifts depending on the commentator, reporter, blogger, or scholar who is using it, one would be extremely hard pressed to find anyone embracing this expansive usage in patent scholarship or similar commentary today.

There are several reasons why the extremely broad definition of “NPE” or “patent troll” in the study is unusual even compared to uses of this term in other commentary or studies. First, and most absurdly, this definition, by necessity, includes every university in the world that sues someone for infringing one of its patents, as universities don’t manufacture goods.  Second, it includes every individual and start-up company who plans to manufacture a patented invention, but is forced to sue an infringer-competitor who thwarted these business plans by its infringing sales in the marketplace.  Third, it includes commercial firms throughout the wide-ranging innovation industries—from high tech to biotech to traditional manufacturing—that have at least one patent among a portfolio of thousands that is not being used at the moment to manufacture a product because it may be “well outside the area in which they make products” and yet they sue infringers of this patent (the quoted language is from the study). So, according to this study, every manufacturer becomes an “NPE” or “patent troll” if it strays too far from what somebody subjectively defines as its rightful “area” of manufacturing. What company is not branded an “NPE” or “patent troll” under this definition, or will necessarily become one in the future given inevitable changes in one’s business plans or commercial activities? This is particularly true for every person or company whose only current opportunity to reap the benefit of their patented invention is to license the technology or to litigate against the infringers who refuse license offers.

So, when almost every possible patent-owning person, university, or corporation is defined as a “NPE” or “patent troll,” why are we surprised that a study that employs this virtually boundless definition concludes that they create $29 billion in litigation costs per year?  The only thing surprising is that the number isn’t even higher!

There are many other methodological flaws in the $29 billion cost study, such as its explicit assumption that patent litigation costs are “too high” without providing any comparative baseline for this conclusion.  What are the costs in other areas of litigation, such as standard commercial litigation, tort claims, or disputes over complex regulations?  We are not told.  What are the historical costs of patent litigation?  We are not told.  On what basis then can we conclude that $29 billion is “too high” or even “too low”?  We’re supposed to be impressed by a number that exists in a vacuum and that lacks any empirical context by which to evaluate it.

The $29 billion cost study also assumes that all litigation transaction costs are deadweight losses, which would mean that the entire U.S. court system is a deadweight loss according to the terms of this study.  Every lawsuit, whether a contract, tort, property, regulatory or constitutional dispute is, according to the assumption of the $29 billion cost study, a deadweight loss.  The entire U.S. court system is an inefficient cost imposed on everyone who uses it.  Really?  That’s an assumption that reduces itself to absurdity—it’s a self-imposed reductio ad absurdum!

In addition to the methodological problems, there are also serious concerns about the trustworthiness and quality of the actual data used to reach the $29 billion claim in the study.  All studies rely on data, and in this case, the $29 billion study used data from a secret survey done by RPX of its customers.  For those who don’t know, RPX’s business model is to defend companies against these so-called “patent trolls.”  So, a company whose business model is predicated on hyping the threat of “patent trolls” does a secret survey of its paying customers, and it is now known that RPX informed its customers in the survey that their answers would be used to lobby for changes in the patent laws.

As every reputable economist or statistician will tell you, such conditions encourage exaggeration and bias in a data sample by motivating participation among those who support changes to the patent law.  Such a problem even has a formal name in economic studies: self-selection bias.  But one doesn’t need to be an economist or statistician to be able to see the problems in relying on the RPX data to conclude that NPEs cost $29 billion per year. As the classic adage goes, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Even worse, as I noted above, the RPX survey was confidential.  RPX has continued to invoke “client confidences” in refusing to disclose its actual customer survey or the resulting data, which means that the data underlying the $29 billion claim is completely unknown and unverifiable for anyone who reads the study.  Don’t worry, the researchers have told us in a footnote in the study, they looked at the data and confirmed it is good.  Again, it doesn’t take economic or statistical training to know that something is not right here. Another classic cliché comes to mind at this point: “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.”

In fact, keeping data secret in a published study violates well-established and longstanding norms in all scientific research that data should always be made available for testing and verification by third parties.  No peer-reviewed medical or scientific journal would publish a study based on a secret data set in which the researchers have told us that we should simply trust them that the data is accurate.  Its use of secret data probably explains why the $29 billion study has not yet appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, and, if economics has any claim to being an actual science, this study never will.  If a study does not meet basic scientific standards for verifying data, then why are Reps. DeFazio and Chaffetz relying on it to propose national legislation that directly impacts the patent system and future innovation?  If heads-in-the-clouds academics would know to reject such a study as based on unverifiable, likely biased claptrap, then why are our elected officials embracing it to create real-world legal rules?

And, to continue our running theme of classic clichés, there’s the rub. The more one looks at the actual legal requirements of the SHIELD Act, the more, in the words of Professor Risch, one is left “scratching one’s head” in bewilderment.  The more one looks at the supporting studies and arguments in favor of the SHIELD Act, the more one is left, in the words of Professor Risch, “scratching one’s head.”  The more and more one thinks about the SHIELD Act, the more one realizes what it is—legislation that has been crafted at the behest of the politically powerful (such as an Internet company who can get the President to do a special appearance on its own social media website) to have the government eliminate a smaller, publicly reviled, and less politically-connected group.

In short, people may have legitimate complaints about the ways in which the court system in the U.S. generally has problems.  Commentators and Congresspersons could even consider revising the general legal rules governing patent ligtiation for all plaintiffs and defendants to make the ligitation system work better or more efficiently (by some established metric).   Professor Risch has done exactly this in a recent Wired op-ed.  But it’s time to call a spade a spade: the SHIELD Act is a classic example of rent-seeking, discriminatory legislation.

In cost-benefit analysis, economics, intellectual property, law and economics, licensing, litigation, patent, politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Copyright, Property Rights, and the Free Market

Adam Mossoff —  1 February 2013

Over at Cato Unbound, there has been a discussion this past month on copyright and copyright reform.  In his recent contribution to this discussion, Mark Schultz posted an excellent essay today, Where are the Creators? Consider Creators in Copyright Reform, that calls out the cramped, reductionist view of copyright policy that leads some libertarians and conservatives to castigate this property right as “regulation” or as “monopoly.”  Here’s a small taste from his essay:

I am genuinely puzzled when copyright discussions treat creative works if they are a pre-existing resource that the government arbitrarily allocates. They are not. They aren’t an imaginary regulatory entitlement, such as pollution credits. They aren’t leases or mineral rights on public land handed out to political cronies. Creative works are, instead, the productive intellectual labor of private parties. Real people make this stuff.

At this point in the discussion, a common rhetorical move is to reject what some scholars describe as the romantic myth of authorship. Copyright skeptics point out that authors build on the work of others and that many creative works are the work of corporations, not individuals. This argument was provoked by many decades—a couple centuries, really—of rhetoric that put the individual author on a pedestal. Even if one concedes that authors have, perhaps, been idealized, taking them for granted goes too far.

The absence of creators from the critique of copyright is one of many reasons I doubt the political (and moral) appeal of much of the case for copyright reform we have heard from a few libertarians and conservatives. At the risk of dredging up tiresome memories from the recent presidential election, the argument over “you didn’t build that” was very familiar to me as a scholar of copyright. In both instances, there is a divide between those who value (or, even, romanticize) individual achievement and those who emphasize how much that achievement depends on a social context.

This follows Mark’s earlier and equally excellent essay, Copyright Reform through Private Ordering, in which he identifies how defining and securing copyright as a property right is consistent with and advances the private-ordering regimes embraced by advocates of the free market.  Again, here’s a small taste:

Like other forms of property, copyright thus represents an invitation to a transaction and an opportunity to bargain. This opportunity for parties to transact and bargain is one of the key differences between property and regulation. A regulator has a duty to enforce the law—and if a regulator chooses not to enforce, then a court may order him to do so. Copyright owners need not enforce their rights, of course. Moreover, it is perfectly legitimate to offer a property owner money to forgo their right to enforce their copyrights; such commercial transactions are really the whole point of copyright. Make the same offer to a regulator, and you go to jail.

Read these essays in their entirety—both of them are here and here—as Mark is doing a great job in what is very brief and limited blogging space in providing both the important data and the principled arguments for how copyright is fundamentally consistent with and advances the aspirations of the free market and limited government.  This follows on his earlier, excellent blog posting at the Copyright Alliance that touched on similar themes, Copyright, Economic Freedom, and the RSC Policy Brief.

DISCLOSURE: Mark and I are both on the Academic Advisory Board of the Copyright Alliance.

In blogging, copyright, intellectual property, law and economics, technology
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George Will on My “Plausible Judgment” About the Future of the ACA

Thom Lambert —  21 January 2013

In his nationally syndicated column this week, Washington Post columnist George Will highlights what he termed my “plausible judgment” (I’m taking that as high praise!) that the Supreme Court’s Affordable Care Act decision “may have made the ACA unworkable, thereby putting it on a path to ultimate extinction.”

Will focuses on the first of my three major points about the ACA, as interpreted by the Supreme Court.  In finding the penalty for failure to carry health insurance to be a tax, the Court emphasized its “smallness” relative to the cost of purchasing qualifying insurance.  (That was one of three factors the Court cited in explaining why this particular “penalty” is really a tax for constitutional purposes.)  Presumably, if Congress were to raise the penalty to approach the out-of-pocket cost of buying insurance, it would cross the line from a tax to, in the Supreme Court’s words, “prohibitory financial punishment” that is not a tax.  This means that the ACA’s low penalties are constitutionally locked in, at least to a significant degree.  That’s a problem, because the penalties are currently so low that it makes sense for young, healthy people to forego insurance and pay the low penalties instead.  This is because the ACA removes the natural incentive for young, healthy people to carry insurance: the risk that they will not be able to get it at affordable rates if they become sick in the future.  That risk is eliminated by the ACA’s “guaranteed issue” and “community rating” provisions.  The former requires insurance companies to sell insurance to anyone who seeks it; the latter forbids them to charge a higher premium to one who is sick or susceptible to sickness.  If you know you can get insurance at a an affordable rate the minute you need health care (which, if you’re young and healthy, you’re not likely to need anytime soon), then why buy it now?  The ACA’s penalties are theoretically designed to motivate young, healthy people to go ahead and buy insurance (thereby subsidizing premiums for the less-healthy), but they’re way too low to be effective.  And the Supreme Court’s tax reasoning suggests that they will cease to count as a “tax” if they’re raised to the point at which they would be effective.  Of course, once young, healthy people leave the pool of insureds, premiums will rise on everyone else, causing even more healthy people to drop out.  Economists call this adverse selection, and it’s wildly pernicious.

Will lays all this out in his typical elegant fashion.  He concludes that “as the president begins his second term, the signature achievement of his first term looks remarkably rickety.”  Indeed.

For two other reasons the ACA, as construed by the Supreme Court, is destined to fail, see my recent Regulation article, How the Supreme Court Doomed the ACA to Failure.

In economics, health care, health care reform debate, law and economics, markets, regulation
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James M. Buchanan — 1919-2013

Thom Lambert —  9 January 2013

Yet another loss of a giant in the world of law and economics.  On December 19, it was Robert Bork.  Today, we lost economist James M. Buchanan, Nobel laureate, George Mason professor, and one of the fathers of Public Choice economics.  Regular readers of TOTM will know that several of us–including yours truly–have been heavily influenced by the insights of Public Choice (see, e.g., here and here).

I was alerted to Buchanan’s passing by my friend and collaborator, Virginia Law’s Charles Goetz, co-author of the Goetz & McChesney (now Goetz, McChesney & Lambert) antitrust casebook.  I asked Charlie if he’d pen a few words in honor of Buchanan, his dissertation director and mentor, and he heartily agreed to do so.  Here they are:

Nobel Laureate James McGill Buchanan has passed away and one less giant now walks the pathways of Economics, pathways that he extended and widened.  Jim was my dissertation director, my mentor, my sometime colleague and coauthor—and my friend. There is an old compliment that denotes a man “a gentleman and a scholar.”  Jim was certainly both, to the quintessential degree.

I often reflect on how fortunate I’ve been with many things, but certainly among the luckiest of things was to be an Economics graduate student at the University of Virginia in the early 1960’s.  It was a golden time when Jim and a handful of others were midwifing the birth of what came to be known as Public Choice economics.  I got to watch and listen as great men did great things.

I remember what an eye-opening experience it was for me to take Buchanan’s year-long course in Public Finance.  He was an incredibly effective teacher.  He was far from a classroom showman, but had the genius of asking such devilishly interesting and revelatory questions.  I have acknowledged publicly on a number of occasions that, if he could charge me for the intellectual value-added that he created in me, he would be owed a very large sum indeed.  But I am profoundly in his debt, even if not in a pecuniary sense.

In the days and weeks to come, others will write many highly complimentary things about James M. Buchanan as a scholar. Deservedly so.  I would have little new to add to that outpouring.  Still, there is a revealing anecdote about Jim as a man that can come only from me, the sole witness and participant.

Buchanan generally had a very formal relationship with students and I understandably regarded him with awe and no little bit of fear.  But, one day, he gave me a great big smile and told me a story that made me appreciate, for the first time, the lurking, devilish sense of humor that went with this proper Tennessee Gentleman.

“Goetz,” he said, “you’re a New Yorker, aren’t you?  But, . . . you’re a pretty good fellow anyway.”

“I often dislike New Yorkers because they act like obnoxious know-it-alls.  There was a New Yorker like that in my class at Navy Officer Candidate school during World War II.  This fellow didn’t have much use for a simple Tennessee boy like me and tried to lord it over us country boys.  But I fixed him.”

“At the end of our OCS course, the Navy gave us a battery of tests that it used in allocating new ensigns to their first duty assignment.  I started a rumor that this NY fellow had come out second in the whole class.  At first, he denied it since, of course, he had no basis to believe it.  Gradually, though, he began to accept congratulations and to puff up more and more about the compliments.”

“Then I started the second rumor, about our further training to battle the Japanese: the first three men in the class were being sent to One-man Submarine School.”

Somehow, I saw Jim with different eyes after that story.  Maybe you will as well.

Requiescat in pace, J. M. Buchanan, the little-known joker and man of honed wit, wit in more ways than the scholarly.  In the midst of our sadness, maybe a chuckle is good medicine.

Well-said, Charlie.

In economics, george mason university school of law, law and economics, nobel prize, political economy
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The price of closing the Google search antitrust case: questionable precedent on patents

Geoffrey Manne —  4 January 2013

The Federal Trade Commission yesterday closed its investigation of Google’s search business (see my comment here) without taking action. The FTC did, however, enter into a settlement with Google over the licensing of Motorola Mobility’s standards-essential patents (SEPs). The FTC intends that agreement to impose some limits on an area of great complexity and vigorous debate among industry, patent experts and global standards bodies: The allowable process for enforcing FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) licensing of SEPs, particularly the use of injunctions by patent holders to do so. According to Chairman Leibowitz, “[t]oday’s landmark enforcement action will set a template for resolution of SEP licensing disputes across many industries.” That effort may or may not be successful. It also may be misguided.

In general, a FRAND commitment incentivizes innovation by allowing a SEP owner to recoup its investments and the value of its technology through licensing, while, at the same, promoting competition and avoiding patent holdup by ensuring that licensing agreements are reasonable. When the process works, and patent holders negotiate licensing rights in good faith, patents are licensed, industries advance and consumers benefit.

FRAND terms are inherently indeterminate and flexible—indeed, they often apply precisely in situations where licensors and licensees need flexibility because each licensing circumstance is nuanced and a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t workable. Superimposing process restraints from above isn’t necessarily the best thing in dealing with what amounts to a contract dispute. But few can doubt the benefits of greater clarity in this process; the question is whether the FTC’s particular approach to the problem sacrifices too much in exchange for such clarity.

The crux of the issue in the Google consent decree—and the most controversial aspect of SEP licensing negotiations—is the role of injunctions. The consent decree requires that, before Google sues to enjoin a manufacturer from using its SEPs without a license, the company must follow a prescribed path in licensing negotiations. In particular:

Under this Order, before seeking an injunction on FRAND-encumbered SEPs, Google must: (1) provide a potential licensee with a written offer containing all of the material license terms necessary to license its SEPs, and (2) provide a potential licensee with an offer of binding arbitration to determine the terms of a license that are not agreed upon. Furthermore, if a potential licensee seeks judicial relief for a FRAND determination, Google must not seek an injunction during the pendency of the proceeding, including appeals.

There are a few exceptions, summarized by Commissioner Ohlhausen:

These limitations include when the potential licensee (a) is outside the jurisdiction of the United States; (b) has stated in writing or sworn testimony that it will not license the SEP on any terms [in other words, is not a “willing licensee”]; (c) refuses to enter a license agreement on terms set in a final ruling of a court – which includes any appeals – or binding arbitration; or (d) fails to provide written confirmation to a SEP owner after receipt of a terms letter in the form specified by the Commission. They also include certain instances when a potential licensee has brought its own action seeking injunctive relief on its FRAND-encumbered SEPs.

To the extent that the settlement reinforces what Google (and other licensors) would do anyway, and even to the extent that it imposes nothing more than an obligation to inject a neutral third party into FRAND negotiations to assist the parties in resolving rate disputes, there is little to complain about. Indeed, this is the core of the agreement, and, importantly, it seems to preserve Google’s right to seek injunctions to enforce its patents, subject to the agreement’s process requirements.

Industry participants and standard-setting organizations have supported injunctions, and the seeking and obtaining of injunctions against infringers is not in conflict with SEP patentees’ obligations. Even the FTC, in its public comments, has stated that patent owners should be able to obtain injunctions on SEPs when an infringer has rejected a reasonable license offer. Thus, the long-anticipated announcement by the FTC in the Google case may help to provide some clarity to the future negotiation of SEP licenses, the possible use of binding arbitration, and the conditions under which seeking injunctive relief will be permissible (as an antitrust matter).

Nevertheless, U.S. regulators, including the FTC, have sometimes opined that seeking injunctions on products that infringe SEPs is not in the spirit of FRAND. Everyone seems to agree that more certainty is preferable; the real issue is whether and when injunctions further that aim or not (and whether and when they are anticompetitive).

In October, Renata Hesse, then Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, remarked during a patent roundtable that

[I]t would seem appropriate to limit a patent holder’s right to seek an injunction to situations where the standards implementer is unwilling to have a neutral third-party determine the appropriate F/RAND terms or is unwilling to accept the F/RAND terms approved by such a third-party.

In its own 2011 Report on the “IP Marketplace,” the FTC acknowledged the fluidity and ambiguity surrounding the meaning of “reasonable” licensing terms and the problems of patent enforcement. While noting that injunctions may confer a costly “hold-up” power on licensors that wield them, the FTC nevertheless acknowledged the important role of injunctions in preserving the value of patents and in encouraging efficient private negotiation:

Three characteristics of injunctions that affect innovation support generally granting an injunction. The first and most fundamental is an injunction’s ability to preserve the exclusivity that provides the foundation of the patent system’s incentives to innovate. Second, the credible threat of an injunction deters infringement in the first place. This results from the serious consequences of an injunction for an infringer, including the loss of sunk investment. Third, a predictable injunction threat will promote licensing by the parties. Private contracting is generally preferable to a compulsory licensing regime because the parties will have better information about the appropriate terms of a license than would a court, and more flexibility in fashioning efficient agreements.

* * *

But denying an injunction every time an infringer’s switching costs exceed the economic value of the invention would dramatically undermine the ability of a patent to deter infringement and encourage innovation. For this reason, courts should grant injunctions in the majority of cases.…

Consistent with this view, the European Commission’s Deputy Director-General for Antitrust, Cecilio Madero Villarejo, recently expressed concern that some technology companies that complain of being denied a license on FRAND terms never truly intend to acquire licenses, but rather “want[] to create conditions for a competition case to be brought.”

But with the Google case, the Commission appears to back away from its seeming support for injunctions, claiming that:

Seeking and threatening injunctions against willing licensees of FRAND-encumbered SEPs undermines the integrity and efficiency of the standard-setting process and decreases the incentives to participate in the process and implement published standards. Such conduct reduces the value of standard setting, as firms will be less likely to rely on the standard-setting process.

Reconciling the FTC’s seemingly disparate views turns on the question of what a “willing licensee” is. And while the Google settlement itself may not magnify the problems surrounding the definition of that term, it doesn’t provide any additional clarity, either.

The problem is that, even in its 2011 Report, in which FTC noted the importance of injunctions, it defines a willing licensee as one who would license at a hypothetical, ex ante rate absent the threat of an injunction and with a different risk profile than an after-the-fact infringer. In other words, the FTC’s definition of willing licensee assumes a willingness to license only at a rate determined when an injunction is not available, and under the unrealistic assumption that the true value of a SEP can be known ex ante. Not surprisingly, then, the Commission finds it easy to declare an injunction invalid when a patentee demands a (higher) royalty rate in an actual negotiation, with actual knowledge of a patent’s value and under threat of an injunction.

As Richard Epstein, Scott Kieff and Dan Spulber discuss in critiquing the FTC’s 2011 Report:

In short, there is no economic basis to equate a manufacturer that is willing to commit to license terms before the adoption and launch of a standard, with one that instead expropriates patent rights at a later time through infringement. The two bear different risks and the late infringer should not pay the same low royalty as a party that sat down at the bargaining table and may actually have contributed to the value of the patent through its early activities. There is no economically meaningful sense in which any royalty set higher than that which a “willing licensee would have paid” at the pre-standardization moment somehow “overcompensates patentees by awarding more than the economic value of the patent.”

* * *

Even with a RAND commitment, the patent owner retains the valuable right to exclude (not merely receive later compensation from) manufacturers who are unwilling to accept reasonable license terms. Indeed, the right to exclude influences how those terms should be calculated, because it is quite likely that prior licensees in at least some areas will pay less if larger numbers of parties are allowed to use the same technology. Those interactive effects are ignored in the FTC calculations.

With this circular logic, all efforts by patentees to negotiate royalty rates after infringement has occurred can be effectively rendered anticompetitive if the patentee uses an injunction or the threat of an injunction against the infringer to secure its reasonable royalty.

The idea behind FRAND is rather simple (reward inventors; protect competition), but the practice of SEP licensing is much more complicated. Circumstances differ from case to case, and, more importantly, so do the parties’ views on what may constitute an appropriate licensing rate under FRAND. As I have written elsewhere, a single company may have very different views on the meaning of FRAND depending on whether it is the licensor or licensee in a given negotiation—and depending on whether it has already implemented a standard or not. As one court looking at the very SEPs at issue in the Google case has pointed out:

[T]he court is mindful that at the time of an initial offer, it is difficult for the offeror to know what would in fact constitute RAND terms for the offeree. Thus, what may appear to be RAND terms from the offeror’s perspective may be rejected out-of-pocket as non-RAND terms by the offeree. Indeed, it would appear that at any point in the negotiation process, the parties may have a genuine disagreement as to what terms and conditions of a license constitute RAND under the parties’ unique circumstances.

The fact that many firms engaged in SEP negotiations are simultaneously and repeatedly both licensors and licensees of patents governed by multiple SSOs further complicates the process—but also helps to ensure that it will reach a conclusion that promotes innovation and ensures that consumers reap the rewards.

In fact, an important issue in assessing the propriety of injunctions is the recognition that, in most cases, firms would rather license their patents and receive royalties than exclude access to their IP and receive no compensation (and incur the costs of protracted litigation, to boot). Importantly, for firms that both license out their own patents and license in those held by other firms (the majority of IT firms and certainly the norm for firms participating in SSOs), continued interactions on both sides of such deals help to ensure that licensing—not withholding—is the norm.

Companies are waging the smartphone patent wars with very different track records on SSO participation. Apple, for example, is relatively new to the mobile communications space and has relatively few SEPs, while other firms, like Samsung, are long-time players in the space with histories of extensive licensing (in both directions). But, current posturing aside, both firms have an incentive to license their patents, as Mark Summerfield notes:

Apple’s best course of action will most likely be to enter into licensing agreements with its competitors, which will not only result in significant revenues, but also push up the prices (or reduce the margins) on competitive products.

While some commentators make it sound as if injunctions threaten to cripple smartphone makers by preventing them from licensing essential technology on viable terms, companies in this space have been perfectly capable of orchestrating large-scale patent licensing campaigns. That these may increase costs to competitors is a feature—not a bug—of the system, representing the return on innovation that patents are intended to secure. Microsoft has wielded its sizeable patent portfolio to drive up the licensing fees paid by Android device manufacturers, and some commentators have even speculated that Microsoft makes more revenue from Android than Google does. But while Microsoft might prefer to kill Android with its patents, given the unlikeliness of this, as MG Siegler notes,

[T]he next best option is to catch a free ride on the Android train. Patent licensing deals already in place with HTC, General Dynamics, and others could mean revenues of over $1 billion by next year, as Forbes reports. And if they’re able to convince Samsung to sign one as well (which could effectively force every Android partner to sign one), we could be talking multiple billions of dollars of revenue each year.

Hand-wringing about patents is the norm, but so is licensing, and your smartphone exists, despite the thousands of patents that read on it, because the firms that hold those patents—some SEPs and some not—have, in fact, agreed to license them.

The inability to seek an injunction against an infringer, however, would ensure instead that patentees operate with reduced incentives to invest in technology and to enter into standards because they are precluded from benefiting from any subsequent increase in the value of their patents once they do so. As Epstein, Kieff and Spulber write:

The simple reality is that before a standard is set, it just is not clear whether a patent might become more or less valuable. Some upward pressure on value may be created later to the extent that the patent is important to a standard that is important to the market. In addition, some downward pressure may be caused by a later RAND commitment or some other factor, such as repeat play. The FTC seems to want to give manufacturers all of the benefits of both of these dynamic effects by in effect giving the manufacturer the free option of picking different focal points for elements of the damages calculations. The patentee is forced to surrender all of the benefit of the upward pressure while the manufacturer is allowed to get all of the benefit of the downward pressure.

Thus the problem with even the limited constraints imposed by the Google settlement: To the extent that the FTC’s settlement amounts to a prohibition on Google seeking injunctions against infringers unless the company accepts the infringer’s definition of “reasonable,” the settlement will harm the industry. It will reinforce a precedent that will likely reduce the incentives for companies and individuals to innovate, to participate in SSOs, and to negotiate in good faith.

Contrary to most assumptions about the patent system, it needs stronger, not weaker, property rules. With a no-injunction rule (whether explicit or de facto (as the Google settlement’s definition of “willing licensee” unfolds)), a potential licensee has little incentive to negotiate with a patent holder and can instead refuse to license, infringe, try its hand in court, avoid royalties entirely until litigation is finished (and sometimes even longer), and, in the end, never be forced to pay a higher royalty than it would have if it had negotiated before the true value of the patents was known.

Flooding the courts and discouraging innovation and peaceful negotiations hardly seem like benefits to the patent system or the market. Unfortunately, the FTC’s approach to SEP licensing exemplified by the Google settlement may do just that. Continue Reading…

In antitrust, contracts, exclusionary conduct, federal trade commission, google, intellectual property, Internet search, law and economics, patent , , , , , , , ,
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Meese on Bork (and the AALS)

Thom Lambert —  22 December 2012

William & Mary’s Alan Meese has posted a terrific tribute to Robert Bork, who passed away this week.  Most of the major obituaries, Alan observes, have largely ignored the key role
Bork played in rationalizing antitrust, a body of law that veered sharply off course in the middle of the last century.  Indeed, Bork began his 1978 book, The Antitrust Paradox, by comparing the then-prevailing antitrust regime to the sheriff of a frontier town:  “He did not sift the evidence, distinguish between suspects, and solve crimes, but merely walked the main street and every so often pistol-whipped a few people.”  Bork went on to explain how antitrust, if focused on consumer welfare (which equated with allocative efficiency), could be reconceived in a coherent fashion.

It is difficult to overstate the significance of Bork’s book and his earlier writings on which it was based.  Chastened by Bork’s observations, the Supreme Court began correcting its antitrust mistakes in the mid-1970s.  The trend began with the 1977 Sylvania decision, which overruled a precedent making it per se illegal for manufacturers to restrict the territories in which their dealers could operate.  (Manufacturers seeking to enhance sales of their brand may wish to give dealers exclusive sales territories to protect them against “free-riding” on their demand-enhancing customer services; pre-Sylvania precedent made it hard for manufacturers to do this.)  Sylvania was followed by:

  • Professional Engineers (1978), which helpfully clarified that antitrust’s theretofore unwieldy ”Rule of Reason” must be focused exclusively on competition;
  • Broadcast Music, Inc. (1979), which held that competitors’ price-tampering arrangements that reduce costs and enhance output may be legal;
  • NCAA (1984), which recognized that trade restraints among competitors may be necessary to create new products and services and thereby made it easier for competitors to enter into output-enhancing joint ventures;
  • Khan (1997), which abolished the ludicrous per se rule against maximum resale price maintenance;
  • Trinko (2004), which recognized that some monopoly pricing may aid consumers in the long run (by enhancing the incentive to innovate) and narrowly circumscribed the situations in which a firm has a duty to assist its rivals; and
  • Leegin (2007), which overruled a 96 year-old precedent declaring minimum resale price maintenance–a practice with numerous potential procompetitive benefits–to be per se illegal.

Bork’s fingerprints are all over these decisions.  Alan’s terrific post discusses several of them and provides further detail on Bork’s influence.

And while you’re checking out Alan’s Bork tribute, take a look at his recent post discussing my musings on the AALS hiring cartel.  Alan observes that AALS’s collusive tendencies reach beyond the lateral hiring context.  Who’d have guessed?

In antitrust, cartels, law and economics, legal scholarship, markets, monopolization, regulation, resale price maintenance, Supreme Court
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The market realities that undermine the antitrust case against Google

Geoffrey Manne —  26 November 2012

As the Google antitrust discussion heats up on its way toward some culmination at the FTC, I thought it would be helpful to address some of the major issues raised in the case by taking a look at what’s going on in the market(s) in which Google operates. To this end, I have penned a lengthy document — The Market Realities that Undermine the Antitrust Case Against Google — highlighting some of the most salient aspects of current market conditions and explaining how they fit into the putative antitrust case against Google.

While not dispositive, these “realities on the ground” do strongly challenge the logic and thus the relevance of many of the claims put forth by Google’s critics. The case against Google rests on certain assumptions about how the markets in which it operates function. But these are tech markets, constantly evolving and complex; most assumptions (and even “conclusions” based on data) are imperfect at best. In this case, the conventional wisdom with respect to Google’s alleged exclusionary conduct, the market in which it operates (and allegedly monopolizes), and the claimed market characteristics that operate to protect its position (among other things) should be questioned.

The reality is far more complex, and, properly understood, paints a picture that undermines the basic, essential elements of an antitrust case against the company.

The document first assesses the implications for Market Definition and Monopoly Power of these competitive realities. Of note:

  • Users use Google because they are looking for information — but there are lots of ways to do that, and “search” is not so distinct that a “search market” instead of, say, an “online information market” (or something similar) makes sense.
  • Google competes in the market for targeted eyeballs: a market aimed to offer up targeted ads to interested users. Search is important in this, but it is by no means alone, and there are myriad (and growing) other mechanisms to access consumers online.
  • To define the relevant market in terms of the particular mechanism that prevails to accomplish the matching of consumers and advertisers does not reflect the substitutability of other mechanisms that do the same thing but simply aren’t called “search.”
  • In a world where what prevails today won’t — not “might not,” but won’t — prevail tomorrow, it is the height of folly (and a serious threat to innovation and consumer welfare) to constrain the activities of firms competing in such an environment by pigeonholing the market.
  • In other words, in a proper market, Google looks significantly less dominant. More important, perhaps, as search itself evolves, and as Facebook, Amazon and others get into the search advertising game, Google’s strong position even in the overly narrow “search” market looks far from unassailable.

Next I address Anticompetitive Harm — how the legal standard for antitrust harm is undermined by a proper understanding of market conditions:

  • Antitrust law doesn’t require that Google or any other large firm make life easier for competitors or others seeking to access resources owned by these firms.
  • Advertisers are increasingly targeting not paid search but rather social media to reach their target audiences.
  • But even for those firms that get much or most of their traffic from “organic” search, this fact isn’t an inevitable relic of a natural condition over which only the alleged monopolist has control; it’s a business decision, and neither sensible policy nor antitrust law is set up to protect the failed or faulty competitor from himself.
  • Although it often goes unremarked, paid search’s biggest competitor is almost certainly organic search (and vice versa). Nextag may complain about spending money on paid ads when it prefers organic, but the real lesson here is that the two are substitutes — along with social sites and good old-fashioned email, too.
  • It is incumbent upon critics to accurately assess the “but for” world without the access point in question. Here, Nextag can and does use paid ads to reach its audience (and, it is important to note, did so even before it claims it was foreclosed from Google’s users). But there are innumerable other avenues of access, as well. Some may be “better” than others; some that may be “better” now won’t be next year (think how links by friends on Facebook to price comparisons on Nextag pages could come to dominate its readership).
  • This is progress — creative destruction — not regress, and such changes should not be penalized.

Next I take on the perennial issue of Error Costs and the Risks of Erroneous Enforcement arising from an incomplete and inaccurate understanding of Google’s market:

  • Microsoft’s market position was unassailable . . . until it wasn’t — and even at the time, many could have told you that its perceived dominance was fleeting (and many did).
  • Apple’s success (and the consumer value it has created), while built in no small part on its direct competition with Microsoft and the desktop PCs which run it, was primarily built on a business model that deviated from its once-dominant rival’s — and not on a business model that the DOJ’s antitrust case against the company either facilitated or anticipated.
  • Microsoft and Google’s other critic-competitors have more avenues to access users than ever before. Who cares if users get to these Google-alternatives through their devices instead of a URL? Access is access.
  • It isn’t just monopolists who prefer not to innovate: their competitors do, too. To the extent that Nextag’s difficulties arise from Google innovating, it is Nextag, not Google, that’s working to thwart innovation and fighting against dynamism.
  • Recall the furor around Google’s purchase of ITA, a powerful cautionary tale. As of September 2012, Google ranks 7th in visits among metasearch travel sites, with a paltry 1.4% of such visits. Residing at number one? FairSearch founding member, Kayak, with a whopping 61%. And how about FairSearch member Expedia? Currently, it’s the largest travel company in the world, and it has only grown in recent years.

The next section addresses the essential issue of Barriers to Entry and their absence:

  • One common refrain from Google’s critics is that Google’s access to immense amounts of data used to increase the quality of its targeting presents a barrier to competition that no one else can match, thus protecting Google’s unassailable monopoly. But scale comes in lots of ways.
  • It’s never been the case that a firm has to generate its own inputs into every product it produces — and there is no reason to suggest search/advertising is any different.
  • Meanwhile, Google’s chief competitor, Microsoft, is hardly hurting for data (even, quite creatively, culling data directly from Google itself), despite its claims to the contrary. And while regulators and critics may be looking narrowly and statically at search data, Microsoft is meanwhile sitting on top of copious data from unorthodox — and possibly even more valuable — sources.
  • To defend a claim of monopolization, it is generally required to show that the alleged monopolist enjoys protection from competition through barriers to entry. In Google’s case, the barriers alleged are illusory.

The next section takes on recent claims revolving around The Mobile Market and Google’s position (and conduct) there:

  • If obtaining or preserving dominance is simply a function of cash, Microsoft is sitting on some $58 billion of it that it can devote to that end. And JP Morgan Chase would be happy to help out if it could be guaranteed monopoly returns just by throwing its money at Bing. Like data, capital is widely available, and, also like data, it doesn’t matter if a company gets it from selling search advertising or from selling cars.
  • Advertisers don’t care whether the right (targeted) user sees their ads while playing Angry Birds or while surfing the web on their phone, and users can (and do) seek information online (and thus reveal their preferences) just as well (or perhaps better) through Wikipedia’s app as via a Google search in a mobile browser.
  • Moreover, mobile is already (and increasingly) a substitute for the desktop. Distinguishing mobile search from desktop search is meaningless when users use their tablets at home, perform activities that they would have performed at home away from home on mobile devices simply because they can, and where users sometimes search for places to go (for example) on mobile devices while out and sometimes on their computers before they leave.
  • Whatever gains Google may have made in search from its spread into the mobile world is likely to be undermined by the massive growth in social connectivity it has also wrought.
  • Mobile is part of the competitive landscape. All of the innovations in mobile present opportunities for Google and its competitors to best each other, and all present avenues of access for Google and its competitors to reach consumers.

The final section Concludes.

The lessons from all of this? There are two. First, these are dynamic markets, and it is a fool’s errand to identify the power or significance of any player in these markets based on data available today — data that is already out of date between the time it is collected and the time it is analyzed.

Second, each of these developments has presented different, novel and shifting opportunities and challenges for firms interested in attracting eyeballs, selling ad space and data, earning revenue and obtaining market share. To say that Google dominates “search” or “online advertising” misses the mark precisely because there is simply nothing especially antitrust-relevant about either search or online advertising. Because of their own unique products, innovations, data sources, business models, entrepreneurship and organizations, all of these companies have challenged and will continue to challenge the dominant company — and the dominant paradigm — in a shifting and evolving range of markets.

Perhaps most important is this:

Competition with Google may not and need not look exactly like Google itself, and some of this competition will usher in innovations that Google itself won’t be able to replicate. But this doesn’t make it any less competitive.  

Competition need not look identical to be competitive — that’s what innovation is all about. Just ask those famous buggy whip manufacturers.

In antitrust, error costs, google, law and economics, markets, monopolization, technology , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Dear DOJ: Take a Look at the Law Schools.

Thom Lambert —  24 November 2012

The U.S. Department of Justice sued eBay last week for agreeing not to poach employees from rival Intuit. According to the Department’s press release, “eBay’s agreement with Intuit hurt employees by lowering the salaries and benefits they might have received and deprived them of better job opportunities at the other company.” DOJ maintains that agreements among rivals not to compete for workers have long been deemed per se illegal. (Indeed, Google, Apple, Adobe, and Pixar quickly settled antitrust claims based on similar non-poaching arrangements in 2010.)

DOJ is right to attack this type of arrangement. Apart from harming individual employees, non-poaching agreements occasion a societal harm: They preclude labor resources from being channeled to their highest and best uses. To poach a competitor’s star employee, you must offer to pay that employee more than she’s currently making (or otherwise adjust the terms of her employment in a way she deems desirable). Her current employer will usually have a chance to counter your offer. If you win the bidding war, it’s likely because the current employer’s willingness-to-pay for the employee—an amount reflective of the degree by which the employee enhances her firm’s value—is less than yours. If you can derive more value from the employee, you should have her. When employers agree to limit competition for workers, they preclude labor resources from flowing to their highest and best ends, causing an “allocative inefficiency.”

So perhaps DOJ should go after the members of the Association of American Law Schools. Pursuant to a Statement of Good Practices to which AALS members scrupulously adhere, each law school has agreed to limit competition with its rivals by refraining from making lateral offers of employment after March 1 each year. Unlike the eBay/Intuit arrangement, the competing law schools’ trade restraint is applicable for only part of the year–from March 1 until the fall hiring season–but it has the same basic effect as the eBay arrangement. And, despite the law schools’ claims to the contrary, it isn’t justified on efficiency grounds.

By preventing law professors from credibly threatening to leave their existing employers after March 1, the AALS restraint significantly reduces professors’ ability to negotiate higher wages or more favorable employment terms. If you announce a competing school’s offer six weeks before fall classes start, you’re much more likely to receive an attractive counter-offer from your current employer than you would be if you sprang the news of your potential departure six months before the start of classes, when you’re more easily replaced. What’s more, law schools generally don’t tell professors what they’ll be earning the following year until after March 1, when it’s too late for a disgruntled professor to secure another offer elsewhere. The AALS restraint thus artificially depresses the salaries of a school’s most desirable professors.

Now this might not seem like something to get worked up over. Most people think law professors are a spoiled lot. They have relatively low teaching loads and, despite the fact that most lack PhDs, they generally earn a good deal more than most academics. Why should DOJ intervene on behalf of these fat cats? Because the law schools’ non-poaching arrangement diminishes the quality of legal education. Here’s why.

At most law schools, where equality of end-states tends to be fetishized, professors are generally compensated in lock-step according to seniority. There’s some variation, but apart from endowed positions, starting salaries and annual raises are around the same level for everyone.

Talent and effort, by contrast, are not evenly distributed. Most law schools have some super-stars who are exceptional teachers and scholars, a number of “solid” professors who put in their time and provide competent teaching and enough scholarship to stay engaged, and a fair bit of dead weight. Lock-step compensation depresses the incentive to move into the first category and enhances the attractiveness of the last. It’s favored by administrators, though, because it permits them to avoid awkward conversations about merit.

If late-in-time departures of professors were a real possibility, administrators would have a stronger incentive to keep their most productive folks happy. They could stand to lose teachers with low course enrollments, so they probably wouldn’t worry too much about keeping their salaries relatively high. They’d also know that their less productive scholars are unlikely to receive a late offer. But highly productive scholars who also provide lots of the thing the law school is ultimately selling–law teaching–would likely begin to earn higher salaries than their less valuable colleagues. With compensation more accurately reflecting the value professors provide, labor resources would be allocated more efficiently. And, of course, law professors would have an increased incentive to make themselves both “poachable” and indispensable by firing on all cylinders–teaching, scholarship, and service.

But don’t the law schools need their non-poaching arrangement in order to prevent scheduling disorder that would hurt students? That’s certainly what they claim. The “Statement of Good Practices” memorializing the law schools’ collusive agreement begins:

[T]he departure of a full-time law teacher always requires changes at the law school. Unless the school is given sufficient time to make the necessary arrangements to find another to offer the instruction given by the departing teacher, the reasonable expectations of students will be  frustrated and the school’s educational program otherwise disrupted. To serve  the best interests of the program of legal education from which the teacher is departing and that to which she or he may be going, the Association urges that law schools and law faculty members follow these suggested practices….

A horizontal restraint of trade, though, isn’t necessary to prevent the sort of harm the law schools envision. If a law school believes it needs some amount of lead time to prepare for a professor’s departure, it may unilaterally negotiate contracts with its professors obligating them to provide a certain amount of notice before any departure and specifying liquidated damages for breach. Unlike the “one-size-fits-all” AALS restraint, such contracts could accommodate heterogeneous needs and preferences. For example, required lead times and the amount of liquidated damages could vary based on the location of the school (urban with lots of adjunct possibilities vs. rural with few), the degree to which the professor’s course offerings require a specialized background (Securities Regulation vs. Contracts), and the pedagogical importance of the courses (Business Organizations vs. Law & Literature). Moreover, this contractarian approach, unlike the AALS’s horizontal restraint, would further allocative efficiency across law schools: If Raider Law is willing to pay Target Law’s hot professor an amount that will increase her salary and cover the liquidated damages she owes Target because of an untimely departure, then Raider must value her more than Target and should get her. Thus, it is possible to achieve the practical benefit the AALS restraint purports to pursue without using a horizontal restraint and in a manner that permits allocative efficiency.

A horizontal agreement not to compete should not be allowed to stand when a less restrictive, easily achieved vertical option could secure the retraint’s benefits. See, e.g., Maricopa County Med. Soc’y (condemning an efficiency-enhancing maximum price-fixing agreement among physicians and observing that the procompetitive benefit occasioned by the restraint could be achieved via vertical agreements rather than a horizontal restraint); NCAA (refusing to allow the need for competitive balance to immunize a naked horizontal restraint because such balance could be achieved less restrictively); cf. Professional Engineers (horizontal agreement not to engage in price negotiations in order to assure high-quality engineering illegal when substantive quality standards could achieve same result).

Perhaps one day the DOJ will acknowledge that American law schools are competitors and, for the benefit of law students and the legal profession, ought to act like it.

In antitrust, doj, law and economics, law school, lawyers, truth on the market
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The Case for Copyright

Adam Mossoff —  20 November 2012

Mark Schultz, law professor and specialist in copyright law, has written an excellent response to the Republican Study Committee policy brief on copyright law that has been making the rounds on the Internet the past several days.  Although the RSC promptly retracted the policy brief, the blogosphere has erupted in commentary on what appeared to be a radical shift in IP policy by one of the explicitly free market caucuses of GOP members.

Mark’s response is a tour-de-force, if only because in a very brief blog posting, he reveals that much of the RSC policy brief is, at best, based on assumptions about copyright that really require a lot more analytical heavy lifting than anything attempted by its author, or, at worst, simply a highly tendentious reading of copyright law and policy.

Here’s just a small taste of some of Mark’s response:

Some also see copyright as a morally suspect interference with economic freedom because they reject the contention that copyright is property. They instead vilify copyright as an odious monopoly or a government-granted privilege or subsidy.

The monopoly accusation is an elementary and persistent error in the economic analysis of intellectual property, as Edmund Kitch once explained in an article with that very title. Edmund W. Kitch, Elementary and Persistent Errors In The Economic Analysis Of Intellectual Property, 53 Vand. L. Rev. 1727 (2000). Dozens of scholarly articles, hundreds of court cases, and thousands of economics classes have repeated the claim that intellectual property grants a monopoly. As Kitch points out, the persistence of the claim does not lessen the error.

Ownership of a property right alone does not accord the owner a monopoly. The hallmark of a monopoly is market power. Owning something that is unique—whether it is a song, a story, or a house—does not give one that kind of power. Even a beautiful house in a nice location cannot command monopoly prices. The same is true of copyrighted works.

There’s more, including a great discussion about whether copyright really is justified, either morally or constitutionally, as only a social utility enhancing monopoly grant, something near and dear to my own scholarly work in the related field of patent law.  Mark concludes his response with a brilliant exposition on how, contrary to the RSC policy brief author’s claim that copyright violates laissez faire capitalism, copyright in fact makes it possible for private ordering to develop and to take root in a flourishing free market.

As Instapundit likes to say: Read the whole thing!

DISCLOSURE: Mark’s response is posted on the blog for the Copyright Alliance, and Mark and I are both members of the Academic Advisory Board of the Copyright Alliance.

In constitutional law, copyright, economics, intellectual property, law and economics, politics
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