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Hovenkamp’s Cases and Materials on Innovation and Competition Policy

Herb Hovenkamp has posted his new casebook on Innovation and Competition Policy to SSRN, where one can download the chapters individually.  This is a very nice development for students; and the book seems perfectly fit for a course on Innovation and Competition Policy — for which it was designed — but also appropriate for a variety of similarly-themed seminar courses.

Professor Hovenkamp describes the aims of the book here:

This is not an “IP/antitrust” casebook.  There are already excellent books in that field.  Only about half of the principal cases printed in this book are antitrust decisions.  I use this book to present issues of innovation and competition policy to students in a broader context, examining not only antitrust but also the intellectual property laws and including shorter examination of several other topics, such as telecommunications, net neutrality, and competition issues raised by the DMCA.  Brief attention is also given to the industrial organization literature on innovation.

This casebook begins with a chapter on patent scope and its implications for innovation, with brief coverage of the Schumpeter-Arrow literature and the problem of sequential innovation.  Then it looks in some detail at the problem of complementary relationships, addressed in antitrust mainly through the law of tying arrangements.  After that is a chapter on remedies issues, followed by chapters on the patent system, copyright, practices that restrain innovation, and intellectual property misuse.  Another chapter covers exclusionary practices and another a wide variety of collaborative arrangements, including pooling, standard setting, blanket licenses, and the like.  The final chapter focuses on vertical restraints and the post-sale (exhaustion) doctrine.

I hope to keep this book up to date on a regular basis and welcome any suggestions for revision or inclusion.  My overall goal, however, is to hold the book somewhere in the range of its current length.

 

Filed under: antitrust