Here are some (draft) slides and materials from my course in International Antitrust and Policy at U.C. Berkeley.

• Segment 1: Introduction
• Segment 2: Horizontal Agreements in the U.S. and the EU
• Segment 3: International cartels at work

As always, everything is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution only license. The (ever evolving) syllabus is here. By the way, weary as I am of the cloud for privacy and policy reasons (I like to control my tools, not vice versa), Google Docs is one great app that just keeps getting better.

Here’s a set of slides discussing horizontal agreements under U.S. law. Eventually, this set will grow to encompass the EU and other jurisdictions.

I recently updated my slides on Antitrust and IP law and the ever popular Microsoft cheat sheet. Note that the slides are now available under a Creative Commons attribution only license (aka cc-BY), which is a more permissive license than the prior attribution-only, non-commercial license. We are, in fact, in the process of relicensing this entire blog under cc-BY, mainly because we got lots of questions whether using our stuff in presentations is commercial or non-commercial use. We don’t think it is, but the new license should put an end to any concerns.

I am very much looking forward to teaching International Antitrust Law at U.C. Berkeley in Spring 2009. Here is the course announcement.

Modern antitrust law is global antitrust law. Driven by economic globalization and trade liberalization, antitrust laws have proliferated around the globe. At the same time, antitrust as a discipline has imported neoclassical price theory as its core analytical framework. The result is a vibrant, multi-faceted discipline, organized around a common core of analytical principles, yet reflective of the different cultural, political, and legal contexts in which government enforcement and litigation ultimately take place. In this course, we will focus on the common economic grammar of virtually all modern antitrust regimes as well as on their distinctive differences. Having a firm grasp of both is critical for building a modern, global antitrust case. Specifically, we will focus on:

• Cross-border mergers and joint ventures
• Monopolization and abuse of dominance
• Global cartels

Using recent cases as a basis for discussion, we will cover topics such as extraterritoriality (e.g., Empagran), institutional design (why does the U.S. have two agencies that enforce the antitrust laws, not to mention the States?), and the economics of mergers, exclusion, and innovation. We will focus specifically on the U.S., the European Union, and China. Many of our cases will involve high-technology firms that deal in tangible and intangible goods and services (e.g., Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Apple, etc.). Along the way, we will discuss legal and cultural aspects of globalization and various flavors of capitalism, and analyze the different functions that antitrust laws play in large (e.g., the U.S.) and small (e.g., Israel), rich and poor economies. The textbook for the course is: E. Elhauge & D. Geradin, Global Antitrust Law and Economics, Foundation Press (2007).

To streamline the preparation and dissemination of materials, I am planning on using Google Docs. I am also toying with the idea of making updates to Wikipedia part of my course assignments.

UPDATE (10/28/08): Here is a draft syllabus, which is still a work in progress. Any suggestions are welcome.

The Washington Post reports that “Atrivo, a.k.a ‘Intercage,’” an ISP “ceased to be reachable from any points on the Internet early Sunday morning when the ISP’s sole remaining provider - Pacific Internet Exchange (PIE) - stopped routing traffic for the troubled company.”  More details below, including allegations that Atrivo was being used for all sorts of nasty, possibly fraudulent activity.  And, for our law professor readers, with a change or two, this could form the basis of an interesting exam question.

From the Post:

The final blow comes just weeks after Security Fix joined several researchers in publishing evidence that major portions of Atrivo’s network were being used to foist fake security software, Trojan horse programs, and other nastiness. As a result of those reports, several of Atrivo’s upstream providers dropped the company as a client.

PIE agreed to provide routing for Atrivo after three other major upstream providers apparently decided it wasn’t worthy the negative publicity of being associated with the company. …

…

For all its years of operation, Atrivo’s Web site consisted of little more than a blue background adorned with a simple “Web Site Launching Soon” banner. Critics took this as evidence that Kacperksi earned the majority of his customers via shady, underground channels.

In an interview last week, Kacperski [Atrivo's founder] said to the extent that there were bad apples hosted on his network, few of them were ever directly reported in e-mailed complaints. Kacperski claims he receives an average of just five complaints about abusive domains hosted on his network each week.

…

In the meantime, a lively debate on Atrivo’s demise has lit up the the mailing list of ISP operators known as the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG), with Kacperski defending his company’s record and vowing to find another upstream provider.

Some have suggested that ISPs and Internet backbone providers should not be allowed to serve as judge, jury and executioner of problematic customers. Dan Goodin of TheRegister.com opined that the multilateral actions against Atrivo amounted to “a temporary and highly imperfect stopgap” orchestrated by “ad hoc malware police.”

Goodin’s stance was echoed by Marcus Sachs, director of the SANS Internet Storm Center. “There are others out there who need to be cut off but we’ve got to find a better way to do it than by creating the virtual equivalent of a lynch mob,” Sachs wrote in a e-mail to Security Fix.

Until that “better way” gains traction, however, it is all but certain that self-interested network providers will persist in efforts to string up the perceived bad actors, said Paul Ferguson, senior researcher at security firm Trend Micro.

“The community must police itself, and this is a fine example of purging badness,” Ferguson said. “Of course, it will pop up elsewhere, but we’re watching.”

This is a completely unsolicited plug for Jeff Adachi’s excellent Bar Breaker and Bar Exam Survival Kit series of books. The two Bar Breaker volumes contain about 80 sample essays with answers and grading keys, and the Survival Kit booklet has condensed outlines of “bar exam law.” Supplement that with BarBri’s Conviser Mini Review, and you’re good to go. I’d recommend the Adachi/Conviser combo over BarBri anytime, in particular for attorney applicants, who only have to take the essay portion of the California Bar Exam and can’t reasonably spend 8 hours/day for six weeks preparing.

Here are the slides from a recent presentation on antitrust issues in mergers and acquisition in Scottsdale, AZ.

Here is the complete set of slides from my Fall 2007 course on Antitrust and Innovation at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. I posted the slides as the course progressed, but these ones contain some updates and bugfixes. As always, the slides are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, so feel free to use whatever you like.

Note that using these and other materials at conferences or for presentations is non-commercial use in my book, even though the conferences may be for profit and the presentations may be paid for (e.g., a PowerPoint for a client). What I have in mind with “commercial use” is, for example, printing and selling the slides. I don’t know if this interpretation is consistent with the current thinking at the Creative Commons, but I find that a broad reading of “non-commercial” would negate the benefits of the CC license — at least for me.

Here are the slides for the October 29, 2007 class on the anatomy of a license agreement and the “antitrust moments,” in negotiating a license agreement.

Technorati Tags: antitrust, teaching, cardozo

These slides discuss two of the most common responses to the “patent thicket” problem, cross-licenses and patent pools. As always, comments are welcome.

Technorati Tags: antitrust, teaching

If economic growth through innovation is the policy goal underwriting both the IP laws and (at least parts of) the antitrust laws, then the question arises whether we are better off with “competition only” policies or with a mixture of “competition plus IP protection” policies. In this class, we explore the arguments of the more radical critics of intellectual property. Accordingly, we ask the question: Why have intellectual property laws at all?

Technorati Tags: antitrust, IP

Here are my slides from a recent PLI Seminar on Antitrust Issues in Licensing. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: antitrust, IP licensing

The U.S. v. Microsoft case is still the Big Kahuna of the IP/AT space and thus deserves a careful parsing of the facts. Most textbooks break up the case into four or five snippets, which I find more confusing than helpful. Attached are the review slides for the last three classes. In addition, here is a separate copy of the somewhat unwieldy map of the Microsoft III monopolization claim, which didn’t fit on one slide. Enjoy!

The review slides from this and last week’s class address unilateral refusals to deal in the U.S. (Kodak I, Kodak II, CSU) and in the EU (Microsoft v. Commission). The syllabus is here. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: teaching, antitrust, cardozo

The review slides from this week’s class provide an overview of the U.S. antitrust laws and the key analytical distinctions, namely unilateral v. coordinated conduct, horizontal v. vertical agreements, inter- v. intrabrand restraints, direct (collusive) and indirect (exclusionary) effects. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: antitrust, teaching