Articles Posted in Civil Non-Merger Highlights

On May 2, FTC Commissioner Jon Leibowitz testified on behalf of the FTC before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection of the Committee on Energy and Commerce regarding anticompetitive patent settlements in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. Leibowitz alleged that recent court cases have made it more difficult to bring antitrust cases…

On April 17, the DOJ and the FTC issued a joint report, “Antitrust Enforcement and Intellectual Property Rights: Promoting Innovation and Competition,” to inform consumers, businesses, and intellectual property rights holders about the agencies’ competition views with respect to a wide range of activities involving intellectual property. The report discusses issues including: refusals to license…

On January 17, testifying before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on the subject of anticompetitive patent settlements in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, FTC Commissioner Jon Leibowitz said that recent court cases have made it more difficult to bring antitrust cases to stop exclusion payment settlements between brand manufacturers and their generic competitors, and that…

On December 29, the Federal Trade Commission announced its decision to challenge the conduct of several organizations representing more than 2,900 independent Chicago-area physicians for agreeing to fix prices and for refusing to deal with certain health plans except on collectively determined terms. The FTC’s complaint charges that the actions of Advocate Health Partners (“AHP”)…

The Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Economics Director Michael Salinger testified on December 7 before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary about the FTC’s January 2006 closure of its investigation into the proposed acquisition by Comcast Corporation and Time Warner Cable Inc. (“TWC”) of the cable assets of Adephia Communications Corporation (“Adelphia”). Salinger explained…

On November 28, 2006, the U.S. District Court in Chicago issued a 29-page opinion allowing the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors (“NAR”) to proceed. The court rejected NAR’s argument that last-minute changes to its policies prevented judicial scrutiny. In denying NAR’s motion to dismiss the case, the district court…

On November 13, a U.S. District Court shut down an operation that secretly downloaded multiple malevolent software programs, including spyware, onto millions of computers without consumers’ consent, degrading their computers’ performance, spying on them, and exposing them to a barrage of disruptive advertisements. The Federal Trade Commission asked the court to order a permanent halt…

On October 30, the DOJ announced that it will not oppose a proposal by the VMEbus International Trade Association (“VITA”) to implement a policy on the disclosure and licensing of patents. The policy requires the disclosure of essential patents, commitments to license essential patent claims on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms, and declarations of the…

On October 6, the FCC ended its investigation into Time Warner Cable’s (“Time Warner”) decision in August to drop the NFL Network without providing appropriate notice to subscribers. The FCC reached a consent decree in which Time Warner agreed that it violated an FCC rule that requires cable operators to provide customers 30 days notice…

The European Commission (“EC”) enlarged the scope of its antitrust review of Intel on September 12 to investigate whether the company pressured an electronics retailer to exclude chips made by Advanced Micro Devices (“AMD”). The relationship between Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, and the retailer, the Media Market division of the German company Metro,…