Posts in Antitrust

FTC’s Khan Pressed by House GOP on Noncompete Proposal, Meta and Twitter Actions

The U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on the Judiciary yesterday held a hearing featuring Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan, who has recently come under fire from the Republican-led House leadership. Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) repeatedly grilled Khan about testimony from the independent assessor for Twitter, Ernst & Young, in the Commission’s recent investigation into the social media platform, which Jordan characterized as “targeted harrassment.”

The Use of Third-Party Surveys in Litigation

Surveys conducted independent of litigation have had mixed success in court. These surveys have been offered as evidence of customer confusion in false advertising cases, intellectual property value in patent cases, consumer behavior in antitrust cases, and plaintiff identification in class actions. In some cases, non-litigation surveys have been admitted as useful evidence on important questions for which data are scarce; in others, they have been excluded as irrelevant or unreliable.

Class Action Suit Against OpenAI Underscores Valuable Property Right Consumers Hold in Their Personal Data

On June 28, a group of 16 individuals filed a class action complaint in the Northern District of California against generative artificial intelligence (GAI) developer OpenAI on several alleged violations of federal and state law on privacy, unfair business practices and computer fraud. The class action lawsuit’s discussion on property interests in consumer data underscores the intellectual property issues that have arisen since the advent of generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, which scrapes personal data and IP-protected material to train its GAI systems.

House Oversight Committee to Investigate FTC Chair Khan Over Wilson Allegations

The Chairman of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Accountability, James Comer (R-KY), announced an investigation this week into accusations raised by former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Commissioner Christine Wilson in her resignation against the conduct of FTC Chair Lina Khan. Wilson sent a letter to President Joe Biden in March claiming that his appointment of Khan as Chair brought “an abrupt halt” to Biden’s promised “return to normalcy” for the agency. She said that Khan “scorned and sidelined” knowledgeable career staff, in part by imposing a gag order on staff “that prevented them from engaging in consumer and business education — a vote of no confidence in our staff and a disservice to those we serve.”

Painting with a Broad Brush: The European Commission’s Failure to Distinguish Seeking Damages for Past Infringement from Seeking an Injunction

Previously, we wrote about how alleged concerns of “hold-up” and a lack of “transparency”, two non-legal terms without accepted definitions, are being used to advocate for special rules applicable to patents subject to declarations regarding Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) licensing. These vague concepts are specifically chosen to obfuscate the real issues impacting FRAND licensing and used in an effort to shift traditional burdens of proof, regulate behavior previously found not to violate antitrust / competition law, and rewrite the express language of the commitment made by patent owners to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). The European Commission (EC) is the latest bull to enter the FRAND licensing China shop.

Lock Patent Owner Strikes Out at CAFC in Suit Against Intel

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Friday affirmed a district court’s ruling dismissing antitrust and patent infringement claims brought by a pro se patent owner against Intel. Larry Golden owns a family of patents that cover a system for locking, unlocking or disabling locks on vehicles upon detection of chemical or biological hazards. Golden has also unsuccessfully sued Apple and the U.S. Government for infringement of the patents.