Posts Tagged: "FTC"

This workshop will examine the economic and legal implications of patent assertion entity (PAE) activity, as distinct from prototypical “non-practicing entity” (NPE) activity, such as developing and transferring technology. By contrast, PAE activities often include purchasing patents from existing owners and seeking to maximize revenues by licensing the intellectual property to (or litigating against) manufacturers who are already using the patented technology.

The Clickbooth affiliate network has agreed to pay $2 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that its affiliate marketers deceived consumers through bogus weight-loss claims on fake news sites about acai berry supplements and so-called “colon cleansers.” The FTC will seek to use the $2 million judgment announced today to provide refunds to consumers who were allegedly deceived by the defendants’…

A company that provides management services to more than 300 payday loan and check cashing stores, and an affiliated company that owns and operates several stores, will pay $101,500 to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that they violated federal law by allowing sensitive consumer information to be tossed into trash dumpsters.

The two companies agreed to settlements with the FTC requiring them to stop making the allegedly deceptive claim that their Dutch Boy Refresh and Pure Performance interior paints, respectively, contain “zero” volatile organic compounds. According to the agency, while this may be true for the uncolored “base” paints, it is not true for tinted paint, which typically has much higher levels of the compounds, and which consumers usually buy.

A web analytics company has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it violated federal law by using its web-tracking software that collected personal data without disclosing the extent of the information that it was collecting. The company, Compete Inc., also allegedly failed to honor promises it made to protect the personal data it collected. The proposed settlement will require that Compete obtain consumers’ express consent before collecting any data from Compete software downloaded onto consumers’ computers, that the company delete or anonymize the use of the consumer data it already has collected, and that it provide directions to consumers for uninstalling its software.

Facial recognition technologies have been adopted in a variety of contexts, ranging from online social networks and mobile apps to digital signs, the FTC staff report states.  They have a number of potential uses, such as determining an individual’s age range and gender in order to deliver targeted advertising; assessing viewers’ emotions to see if they are engaged in a video game or a movie; or matching faces and identifying anonymous individuals in images. Facial recognition also has raised a variety of privacy concerns because – for example – it holds the prospect of identifying anonymous individuals in public, and because the data collected may be susceptible to security breaches and hacking.

The Federal Trade Commission is challenging the public to create an innovative solution that will block illegal commercial robocalls on landlines and mobile phones. As part of its ongoing campaign against these illegal, prerecorded telemarketing calls, the agency is launching the FTC Robocall Challenge, and offering a $50,000 cash prize for the best technical solution.

The Federal Trade Commission will require Watson Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Actavis Inc. to sell the rights and assets to 18 drugs to Sandoz International GmbH and Par Pharmaceuticals, Inc, and relinquish the manufacturing and marketing rights to three others, to settle charges that Watson’s proposed $5.9 billion acquisition of Actavis would otherwise be anticompetitive.

The Federal Trade Commission will host a workshop on December 6, 2012, to explore the practices and privacy implications of comprehensive collection of data about consumers’ online activities. Entities such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs), operating systems, browsers, social media, and mobile carriers have the capability to collect data about computer users across the Internet, beyond direct interactions between consumers and these entities. The workshop will bring together consumer protection organizations, academics, business and industry representatives, privacy professionals, and others to examine the collection and use of such data, its potential benefits, privacy concerns, and related issues. The workshop is free and open to the public.

In a “no-AG” agreement, the branded firm, as part of the patent litigation settlement, agrees that it will not launch its own generic alternative when the first generic begins to compete. Since the introduction of the branded AG would cut into the revenues of a competing generic product, a no-AG commitment can induce the generic firm to delay entry of its product to the market. Thus, the Commission concludes, a no-AG commitment is legally sufficient to trigger a rebuttable presumption of illegality under the law of the Third Circuit.

At the request of the Federal Trade Commission, the Solicitor General of the United States petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review a recent federal appeals court ruling concerning the FTC’s case against a “pay-for-delay” agreement. The petition for certiorari, the mechanism for asking for the Supreme Court to review a case, argues that the agreement that postponed generic competition for the testosterone-replacement drug AndroGel is anti-competitive and should not be legal. But thanks to the byzantine legal rules created by the Hatch-Waxman Act, the brand name owner was doing nothing more than what seems to explicitly be authorized by the law.

Seven rent-to-own companies and a software design firm have agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that they spied on consumers using computers that consumers rented from them, capturing screenshots of confidential and personal information, logging their computer keystrokes, and in some cases taking webcam pictures of people in their homes, all without notice to, or consent from, the consumers.

Today’s “follow Friday” recommendations focus on those in the U.S. government who tweet about innovation and intellectual property, with a focus on those who are lesser-known, at least based on the number of Twitter followers.

J. Posner also brought the value of the patents declared to be essential under standards bodies to bear on the damages question.  Essential patents must be evaluated for absolute value and relative value to the full-declared portfolio.  These values are needed where a non-linear function is proposed for a royalty determination based on infringement of a subset of the declared patents.  The difficulty presented by an assertion of a single essential patent from a much larger portfolio is “that if [the potential licensee] had wanted to license any of the patents in [the standard’s essential portfolio], the license fee would have exceeded the product of the percentage of the portfolio represented by the patent and the value of the entire portfolio.”  Objective data to present a non-linear function was needed, and even where presented, the notion of a FRAND royalty applied to “confine the patentee’s royalty demand to the value conferred by the patent itself as distinct from the additional value – the hold-up value – conferred by the patent’s being designated as standards essential.”

According to the FTC, coupons are a big business.  There are more than 3,000 manufacturers that annually distribute nearly 330 billion coupons that are worth an estimated $280 billion. With this type of marketplace it is easy to understand why opportunistic criminals would be interested in the industry, particularly given the economic plight of the moment caused by the Great Recession, which we cannot seem to escape.  Tough times cause people to be more cost conscious, but this also provides the perfect cover for con artists and scammers.