By Dennis Crouch
Professor Herbert Hovenkamp (U. Iowa) is the most influential US antitrust scholar and author of the most cited legal treatise on antitrust law. He has written extensively on all areas of antitrust law, including the intersection between antitrust, innovation, and intellectual property.
Although the antitrust treatise sells for over $3,000, Professor Hovenkamp recently made new casebook on innovation and competition available for a free download (subject to an open source license agreement). The casebook is entitled INNOVATION AND COMPETITION POLICY: CASES AND MATERIALS. Professor Hovenkamp introduces the book as follows:
This book … differs from IP/antitrust casebooks in that it considers numerous sources of competition policy in addition to antitrust, including those that emanate from the intellectual property laws themselves, and also related issues such as the relationship between market structure and innovation, the competitive consequences of regulatory rules governing technology competition such as net neutrality and interconnection, misuse, the first sale doctrine, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The author uses this casebook for a three-unit class in Innovation and Competition Policy taught at the University of Iowa College of Law and available to first year law students as an elective.
Major topics include
- Impact of patent scope on competition;
- The law of tying;
- Determining harm to innovation;
- Competition policy in patent law;
- Competition policy in copyright and under the DMCA;
- Restraints on innovation;
- Misuse of intellectual property;
- Anticompetitive exclusion;
- Innovation commons; and
- Post-sale restraints that involve IP rights.
In the words of Prof. Solum, Download it while its hot!
