We explore potential methods for assessing whether licensing terms for intellectual property declared essential within a standard setting organization can be considered fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND). We first consider extending Georgia-Pacific to a standard setting context. We...

The quote in the title refers to a recurring principle in the Antitrust Guidelines for the Licensing of Intellectual Property, issued jointly by the US Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission in 1995. That report states that “The Agencies” general approach in analyzing a...

Under the legal doctrine of first sale, or patent exhaustion, a patent holder's ability to license multiple parties along a production chain is restricted. How and when such restrictions should be applied is a controversial issue, as evidenced by the Supreme Court's granting certiorari in the...

This Essay describes an approach for designing antitrust rules for assessing whether firms have engaged in anticompetitive unilateral practices that is based in part on the error-cost framework pioneered by Judge Easterbrook. We focus particularly on the role of economic theory and evidence in...

RAND commitments—i.e., promises to license on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms— play a key role in standard setting processes. However, the usefulness of those commitments has recently been questioned. The problem allegedly lies in the absence of a generally agreed test to determine...

A few recent contributions to the literature have claimed that in high-tech industries -- where innovation is often cumulative and products include many components protected by patents held by many different patent holders – the cost of obtaining all necessary licenses is too high. Some have...

European competition laws condemn as “exploitative abuses” the pricing policies of dominant firms that may result in a direct loss of consumer welfare. Article 82(a) of the EC Treaty, for example, expressly states that imposing “unfair” prices on consumers by dominant suppliers...