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

Attached are the slides from today’s first class on Antitrust, IP, and Innovation. The goal is to put IP and AT policy in the much broader context of (macro-) economic growth, productivity, and investment in R&D. Here is the evolving syllabus for the course.

Technorati Tags: antitrust, IP, innovation policy

I will be speaking at the American Law Institute’s Corporate Mergers & Acquisitions Seminar in Boston later this year. Here are the printed slides for my talk. (The live slides will be somewhat different.)

Technorati Tags: antitrust

Here is the (draft) syllabus for the course on Antitrust and Innovation, which I will teach at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law this fall. While there are many excellent casebooks on antitrust on the one hand and IP on the other, there is precious little teaching material focusing specifically on the antitrust/IP interface. (One notable exception is Gary Myers, The Intersection of Antitrust and Intellectual Property (2007).) In selecting materials for the course, I tried to give roughly equal weight to:

• Bedrock case law
• Emerging case law (e.g., exclusion via DRM, DMCA)
• Agency practice (e.g., IP2 report) and mainstream scholarship
• Radical critics of the intellectual property regime.

Technorati Tags: antitrust, IP, teaching

• Both Truth on the Market and the Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog report on a conference co-sponsored by George Mason Law School and Microsoft on the law and economics of innovation. As it is a short metro (subway) ride from my office, I hope to attend (and perhaps even live blog the conference).

• The Patent Baristas discuss reverse payment settlements in Hatch-Waxman litigaiton.

• One of my old law professors, David Cole, has an op-ed in the Washington Post suggesting that laptops with wireless internet access may not help classroom learning. I agree.

• The Sports Law Blog, a long-time Antitrust Review favorite, discusses the fascinating issue of ensuring competition among NBA teams (ensuring competitive games, not ensuring competition for the first pick in the draft by tanking games) (the comments also deal with some antitrust (non)issues).

• Although waaaaay off-topic, since Hanno is a big Battlestar Galatica fan, the best quote I have seen from an actor in years is from Katee Sackhoff, who plays Kara “Starbuck” Thrace on Battlestar Galactica. From the LA Times: “In the first minute of this interview, Sackhoff admitted that she was hung over, because, she said, ‘I don’t want you to think I’m stupid. I’d rather you think I’m, you know, a drunk.’”

Technorati Tags: antitrust, Battlestar Galatica, NBA

Here are the slides (in .pdf format) of a presentation I recently gave in Chicago on Antitrust Issues in IP Licensing.

Technorati Tags: antitrust, IP