A PYMNTS Company

2020 Audio


For too long now, the NCAA has hidden behind its veil of “amateurism” to justify depriving college athletes of reasonable compensation for use of their name, image, and likeness (“NIL”), much needed comprehensive academic opportunities, and much more. While significant incremental improvements have been achieved through litigation, legislatures have finally realized that they have a role to play in creating an equitable system of intercollegiate athletics. Ever since California passed the Fair Pay to Play Act in 2019, there has been exponential increase in the introduction of reform bills targeting the injustices of college athlete compensation under the NCAA’s regime. In this article, the authors address a proposed formula for federal legislation aimed to achieve a more equitable system in intercollegiate athletics.

Ten years ago the U.S. antitrust agencies began using conduct remedies more frequently and more expansively than ever before. Research and experience, however, highlighted the limitations of such remedies, and so more recently the agencies have restated their determination to avoid the use of conduct remedies wherever possible and to strengthen remedies policy generally. Despite those statements, the agencies have in fact continued to rely on conduct remedies and indeed further expanded their use in ever more problematic ways. Three examples discussed in this article are the recent amendment to the original Ticketmaster-Live Nation settlement, the merger of Staples and Essendant, and the Sprint/T-Mobile merger. The conclusion of this review is that little appears to have been learned about the weaknesses of conduct remedies over the past decade.

There is a substantial literature examining the experience in both the United States and the European Union with the imposition by enforcement agencies of remedies as a condition for a merger to proceed without challenge. The broad goals of the agencies have arguably remained consistent over the years, and a number of more specific “lessons” of the past seem to have become broadly accepted, including both a general preference for structural over behavioral remedies but also a willingness to impose behavioral remedies in certain, limited situations, either in support of structural remedies or on their own. This paper examines some arguably underappreciated complications arising from the imposition of behavioral remedies, including the difficulty of enforcing non-discrimination provisions, the danger of perverse incentives provided by such provisions, and the counter-argument – common in the debates regarding infrastructure access pricing – that in some circumstances discrimination itself may be pro- rather than anti-competitive.

Licensing standard essential patents (“SEPs”) for the Internet of Things (“IoT”) will create novel challenges for parties involved in both standardization and the licensing process. This paper explains how the IoT will affect the creation and implementation of standardized technology and then examines four emerging questions about SEP licensing for the IoT that need to be answered: (i) How to create transparency related to standardized technology and IP license offers? (ii) Who may obtain a license in the IoT market? (iii) Will patent pools help streamline licensing for the IoT? and (iv) How to reduce the possibility of litigation?