• The Corporate Crime Reporter reports on a paper by the Hudson Institute’s Irwin Stelzer in which he, according to the report, argues that it “would be folly to abandon or seriously weaken the nation’s antitrust laws.”

• Last week, FTC chairman Deborah Platt Majoras spoke at the American Conference Institute’s Conference on Pharmaceutical Antitrust.  In it, she states that:

going forward, the Commission will work to change the prevailing legal standards for evaluating the antitrust implications of reverse-payment settlements because they have tipped too far in favor of settlement payments to holders of even the “weakest” of patents. It simply cannot be correct, as at least one court ruling implies, that, in the absence of a sham or a fraud, any patent holder that walks into a federal courthouse and files a complaint that alleges that a generic manufacturer has infringed its patent, is then entitled to pay the generic manufacturer any amount of money not to compete with the brand manufacturer for as long as the nominal term of the patent. Put more bluntly, there is no reason to believe that every time that patent holder alleges in a legal complaint that a generic manufacturer has infringed its patent, that the infringement has in fact occurred. Indeed, the empirical evidence is to the contrary. Data show that generic applicants have had nearly a 75 percent success rate in pharmaceutical patent infringement litigation. The challenge for the antitrust enforcement agencies, the courts, and the pharmaceutical industry at large is to devise a workable rule, or set of rules, to distinguish those patent settlements that restrain competition from those that do not. By workable, I mean rules that provide clear standards, promote innovation and efficiency, and can be applied in a cost effective manner.

• At SCOTUSblog, Mark Botti comments on Twombly.

• In addition to holding its Annual Conference on June 21 (with a focus on monopoly and monopolization), the American Antitrust Institute is hosting an “Invitational Symposium on Buyer Power” on June 20.

• The FTC’s Bureau of Economics Director Michael A. Salinger testified on behalf of the FTC today before the U.S. Congress’ Joint Economic Committee.  He “described the FTC’s initiatives to protect competitive markets in the production, distribution, and sale of gasoline through the agency’s comprehensive merger program.”  His prepared testimony is available online.

• Yesterday, the Department of Justice:

filed a civil antitrust lawsuit … in U.S. District Court in Charleston, W.Va., alleging that the Daily Gazette Company and MediaNews Group Inc. (MediaNews) violated the antitrust laws when they entered a series of transactions in May 2004 that resulted in the acquisition by Daily Gazette Company of the Daily Mail newspaper from MediaNews. The Department’s lawsuit seeks an order requiring the parties to undo their transactions and restore the competition that existed before May 2004.

The AP (via Business Week) has an article about this matter and the complaint is posted on DOJ’s website.

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