The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 is a United States antitrust law which prescribes the rule of free competition among those engaged in commerce and consequently prohibits unfair monopolies. It was passed by Congress and is named for Senator John Sherman, its principal author.
The Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, is a part of United States antitrust law with the goal of adding further substance to the U.S. antitrust law regime; the Clayton Act seeks to prevent anticompetitive practices in their incipiency.
In the United States, antitrust law is a collection of mostly federal laws that govern the conduct and organization of businesses in order to promote economic competition and prevent unjustified monopolies. The three main U.S. antitrust statutes are the Sherman Act of 1890, the Clayton Act of 1914, and the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. These acts serve three major functions. First, Section 1 of the Sherman Act prohibits price fixing and the operation of cartels, and prohibits other collusive practices that unreasonably restrain trade. Second, Section 7 of the Clayton Act restricts the mergers and acquisitions of organizations that may substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly. Third, Section 2 of the Sherman Act prohibits monopolization.
The rule of reason is a legal doctrine used to interpret the Sherman Antitrust Act, one of the cornerstones of United States antitrust law. While some actions like price-fixing are considered illegal per se, other actions, such as possession of a monopoly, must be analyzed under the rule of reason and are only considered illegal when their effect is to unreasonablyrestrain trade. William Howard Taft, then Chief Judge of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, first developed the doctrine in a ruling on Addyston Pipe and Steel Co. v. United States, which was affirmed in 1899 by the Supreme Court. The doctrine also played a major role in the 1911 Supreme Court case Standard Oil Company of New Jersey v. United States.
Competition law is the field of law that promotes or seeks to maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies. Competition law is implemented through public and private enforcement. It is also known as antitrust law, anti-monopoly law, and trade practices law; the act of pushing for antitrust measures or attacking monopolistic companies is commonly known as trust busting.
In United States patent law, patent misuse is a patent holder's use of a patent to restrain trade beyond enforcing the exclusive rights that a lawfully obtained patent provides. If a court finds that a patent holder committed patent misuse, the court may rule that the patent holder has lost the right to enforce the patent. Patent misuse that restrains economic competition substantially can also violate United States antitrust law.
The Hazel-Atlas Glass Company was a large producer of machine-molded glass containers headquartered in Wheeling, West Virginia. It was founded in 1902 in Washington, Pennsylvania, as the merger of four companies:
Continental Paper Bag Co. v. Eastern Paper Bag Co., 210 U.S. 405 (1908), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States established the principle that patent holders have no obligation to use their patent.
Continental Can Company (CCC) was an American producer of metal containers and packaging company, that was based in Stamford, Connecticut.
In competition law, before deciding whether companies have significant market power which would justify government intervention, the test of small but significant and non-transitory increase in price (SSNIP) is used to define the relevant market in a consistent way. It is an alternative to ad hoc determination of the relevant market by arguments about product similarity.
General Talking Pictures Corp. v. Western Electric Co., 304 U.S. 175 (1938), was a case that the Supreme Court of the United States decided in 1938. The decision upheld so-called field-of-use limitations in patent licenses: it held that the limitations were enforceable in a patent infringement suit in federal court against the licensee and those acting in concert with it—for example, a customer that knowingly buys a patented product from the licensee that is outside the scope of the license.
A post-sale restraint, also termed a post-sale restriction, as those terms are used in United States patent law and antitrust law, is a limitation that operates after a sale of goods to a purchaser has occurred and purports to restrain, restrict, or limit the scope of the buyer's freedom to utilize, resell, or otherwise dispose of or take action regarding the sold goods. Such restraints have also been termed "equitable servitudes on chattels".
The Cellophane paradox describes a type of incorrect reasoning used in market regulation methods.
Brockway Glass Company was founded in 1907 in Brockway, Pennsylvania by the Brockway Machine Bottle Company. Brockway manufactured and sold glass containers and tubing along with plastic products manufactured through wholly owned subsidiaries. In 1964, Brockway bought several Hazel-Atlas Glass Company factories from the Continental Can Company as part of a lawsuit settlement. In 1987, Owens-Illinois made a bid of $60 per share to acquire Brockway, which was met with resistance by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). After a Federal District Judge denied the FTC's request for an injunction, Owens-Illinois acquired Brockway's shares.
FTC v. Actavis, Inc., 570 U.S. 136 (2013), was a United States Supreme Court decision in which the Court held that the FTC could make an antitrust challenge under the rule of reason against a so-called pay-for-delay agreement, also referred to as a reverse payment patent settlement. Such an agreement is one in which a drug patentee pays another company, ordinarily a generic drug manufacturer, to stay out of the market, thus avoiding generic competition and a challenge to patent validity. The FTC sought to establish a rule that such agreements were presumptively illegal, but the Court ruled only that the FTC could bring a case under more general antitrust principles permitting a defendant to assert justifications for its actions under the rule of reason.
United States v. Philadelphia National Bank, 374 U.S. 321 (1963), also called the Philadelphia Bank case, was a 1963 decision of the United States Supreme Court that held Section 7 of the Clayton Act, as amended in 1950, applied to bank mergers. It was the first case in which the Supreme Court considered the application of antitrust laws to the commercial banking industry. In addition to holding the statute applicable to bank mergers, the Court established a presumption that mergers that covered at least 30 percent of the relevant market were presumptively unlawful.
United States v. Socony-Vacuum Oil Co., 310 U.S. 150 (1940), is a 1940 United States Supreme Court decision widely cited for the proposition that price-fixing is illegal per se. The Socony case was, at least until recently, the most widely cited case on price fixing.
Hartford-Empire Co. v. United States, 323 U.S. 386 (1945), was a patent-antitrust case that the Government brought against a cartel in the glass container industry. The cartel, among other things, divided the fields of manufacture of glass containers, first, into blown glass and pressed glass, which was subdivided into: products made under the suction process, milk bottles, and fruit jars. The trial court found the cartel violative of the antitrust laws and the Supreme Court agreed that the market division and related conduct were illegal. The trial court required royalty-free licensing of present patents and reasonable royalty licensing of future patents. A divided Supreme Court reversed the requirement for royalty-free licensing as "confiscatory," but sustained the requirement for reasonable royalty licensing of the patents.
Hazel-Atlas Glass Co. v. Hartford-Empire Co., 322 U.S. 238 (1944), is a much cited 1944 decision of the United States Supreme Court dealing with fraud on the Patent Office. A widely quoted statement in the Court's opinion is: "The public welfare demands that the agencies of public justice be not so impotent that they must always be mute and helpless victims of deception and fraud." Although the fraud occurred in the late 1920s, the facts became public only much later in the Government's antitrust trial in United States v. Hartford-Empire Co.
United States v. Throckmorton is an 1878 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court on civil procedure, specifically res judicata, in cases heard at equity. A unanimous Court affirmed an appeal of a decision by the District Court for California upholding a Mexican-era land claim, holding that collateral estoppel bars untimely motions to set aside the verdict where the purportedly fraudulent evidence has already been considered and a decision reached. In the opinion it distinguished between that kind of fraud, which it called intrinsic, and extrinsic fraud, in which deceptive actions exterior to the proceeding prevented a party, or potential party, to the action from becoming aware of the possibility they could vindicate their rights in court.
