In this issue: Welcome to the home page of The CPI Antitrust Chronicle (formerly GCP Magazine).  In this issue, we’re revisiting an old friend – Leegin. Numerous states and Congress continue to be unhappy with the Supreme Court ruling and each is trying to determine how to turn the clock back. We present both sides […]

Morissa Falk, Jay Himes, Jan 25, 2010 The debate over RPM centers on the fact that vertical price-fixing’s purpose is to increase an item’s price beyond that likely to prevail absent the price-fixing. As a leading commentator has said, RPM “tends to produce higher consumer prices than would otherwise be the case. The evidence is […]

Court, David Olsky, Jan 29, 2010 Over the past three years, certain state attorneys general have spoken out strongly against Resale Price Maintenance (“RPM”) practices, upset with the Supreme Court decision in Leegin. Citing their own state laws, these state enforcers have insisted that the per se prohibitions on RPM that existed prior to Leegin […]

Shanker Singham, Jan 26, 2010 Consumer welfare, which should be the guiding principle of competition policy implementation, is often mistaken for consumer protection.Whereas consumer protection looks to the interests of present consumers, the concept of consumer welfare looks to the long term impacts of a given competition policy and, by extension, the interests of future […]

James Grimmelmann, Jan 26, 2010 The deal that Google would get under the proposed amended settlement in the Authors Guild case is exclusive in one very important sense. Many out-of-print books are so-called “orphan works”: they’re in copyright, but their copyright owners can’t be found. If you or I start printing new copies of these […]

Roger Blair, Jessica Haynes, Jan 25, 2010 In 1911, the Supreme Court addressed resale price maintenance (“RPM”) for the first time. Although RPM is a vertical price restraint, the Court treated it as a horizontal restraint and found RPM to be illegal per se. This, we believe, was an error that went uncorrected for nearly […]

Leiv Blad, Bryan Killian, Jan 27, 2010 Overturning a 96-year-old rule, the United States Supreme Court held in Leegin that minimum resale price maintenance (“RPM”) agreements would no longer be considered illegal per se under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, but instead would be evaluated under the more lenient “rule of reason.” A number […]