Posts Tagged: "FTC"

Yet another ad that the FTC took issue with was one featuring celebrities including Kim Kardashian and Brooke Burke, which aired during the 2011 Super Bowl. In the ad Kardashian is showed dumping her personal trainer for a pair of Shape-ups. In the Burke ad consumers were told that the newest way to burn calories, tone and strengthen muscles was to tie their Shape-ups shoe laces. Clearly, the message is that you don’t need to work out if you wear Shape-ups, which turns out to be untrue. What a surprise! Frankly, I’m not sure that these ads deserved the ire of the FTC.

So what did Apple and the other publishers do that put them on Uncle Sam’s Radar? Allegedly, they agreed among themselves to sell their e-books at the same price. This is also known as “Price Fixing” and it’s a big no-no. When companies who sell the same product agree among themselves to set the same price for that product, they could (not necessarily will) set that price as high as they wish, because there will be no place cheaper to get it. The type of price fixing alleged here – ‘horizontal’ price fixing – is considered violative of the Sherman Act regardless of the effect on the market. This means that even if the agreement didn’t actually harm the market whatsoever, it would still be considered anti-competitive.

Yes, I had the audacity to say what is objectively correct. There is no absolute right under the First Amendment to engage in false or misleading speech. Despite the fact that this statement is legally 100% correct you would have thought I was engaging in treasonous behavior. What made it all the more comical was that it was the anarchists who seemed most upset, both in comments on IPWatchdog and in a variety of Twitter and blog articles that sought to paint me as some kind of crazy. You see the anarchists got so upset because the only play in their playbook is to lie and misrepresent in order to pull the wool over the eyes of enough people that they can get their way. That is where America is currently and if you ask me that is wholly unacceptable.

As I read through the patents and patent applications discussed below, and the many more I did not include, I started to wonder whether anyone has any reasonable expectation of privacy at all any more. I am a big fan of the CBS drama Person of Interest, and the surveillance system from that show that ferrets out dangerous on both macro and micro levels doesn’t seem quite so far fetched. I suppose that is why the FTC is seeking comments on facial recognition technologies and the government is attempting to get its hands around the enormous issues and promulgate some rules or guidelines.

A developer of mobile applications, including children’s games for the iPhone and iPod touch, will pay $50,000 to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the FTC’s COPPA Rule by illegally collecting and disclosing personal information from tens of thousands of children under age 13 without their parents’ prior consent. This is the Commission’s first case involving mobile applications, known as apps.

We conclude that the FTC has not identified sufficient evidence to raise serious doubt about the current efficiencies of the IP marketplace. Indeed, the available empirical evidence suggests that these existing rules and practices work well. The interests of consumers are well represented by standard setting organizations and competition among technology implementers who at the end of the day must make goods and services that people wish to purchase.

Between 1995 and 2009 the overall median patent litigation damage award was $5.2 million, but between 2002-2009 there was a huge discrepancy between the average damage award for practicing entities versus non-practicing entities. The median award for non-practicing entities was $12.9 million, while the median award for practicing entities lagged far behind at $3.9 million. No wonder there is ever increasing activities by those the Federal Trade Commission refers to as “patent assertion entities,” which seems to be yet another sanitized name for patent troll.

On Thursday, November 4, 2010, I attended the 15th Annual Inventors Conference at the USPTO.  In my article Reporting from the 15th Annual USPTO Inventors Conference I discussed the morning sessions and lunch speaker, for day one of the conference.  After lunch, and a panel discussion of the morning speakers, the attendees of the conference went into two sets of…

The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice on Friday, August 19, 2010, issued revised Horizontal Merger Guidelines that outline how the federal antitrust agencies evaluate the likely competitive impact of mergers and whether those mergers comply with U.S. antitrust law. These changes to the Guidelines mark the first major revision of the merger guidelines in 18 years, and is…

The Federal Trade Commission has permanently halted the operations of Canadian con artists who allegedly posed as domain name registrars and convinced thousands of U.S. consumers, small businesses and non-profit organizations to pay bogus bills by leading them to believe they would lose their Web site addresses unless they paid. Settlement and default judgment orders signed by the court will…

The Federal Trade Commission approved a settlement with Intel Corp. that resolves charges the company illegally stifled competition in the market for computer chips. Intel has agreed to provisions that will open the door to renewed competition and prevent Intel from suppressing competition in the future. Under this agreement Intel must modify its intellectual property agreements with AMD, Nvidia, and Via so that those companies have more freedom to consider mergers or joint ventures with other companies, without the threat of being sued by Intel for patent infringement.

On Wednesday, May 26, 2010, the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will hold a joint public workshop on the intersection of patent policy and competition policy and its implications for promoting innovation. Assistant Attorney General for the department’s Antitrust Division Christine Varney, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO David J. Kappos, and U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra will give opening remarks at the morning session of the workshop. FTC Commissioner Edith Ramirez will open the afternoon session.

Invention promotion firms, sometimes referred to as invention promotion companies, have been widely criticized in numerous circles, including political circles in Washington, DC, for many years.  The American Inventors Protection Act (AIPA) was enacted into law in 1999 and by its very name sought to address head on the problems faced by so many inventors.  In truth, the title of…

European Union regulators on Wednesday dropped an antitrust investigation into Rambus Inc. after the company agreed to cap royalty fees for memory chip patents. In an agreement reached between EU regulators and Rambus, Rambus will not charge any royalties for SDR and DDR chip standards and to bring fees for newer versions of DDR down from 3.5 percent to 1.5…

For many months we have been hearing about the government attempts to “reform” health care in the United States, and this weekend the United States Senate is actually working, yes Senators working on a weekend, as the contentious debate continues. Even a relatively rare Presidential visit to Capitol Hill is scheduled for later this afternoon, presumably so President Obama can…