Years of FTC reports and litigation have shaped patent law with and without Congress – Watchdog.org
“There has always been a tension between the antitrust laws and patent law,” Adam Mossoff, co-founder of the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property and professor at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, told Watchdog.org. “[A]ntitrust authorities have historically been very skeptical [of innovative companies] and have tended to find so-called monopolization activities when in fact it’s just the evolution and development of a new market that never existed before.”
Mossoff and others worry that the commission has undermined property rights, threatening companies’ incentives to invest and innovate and encouraging foreign countries to disregard IP protections, all the while basing its enforcement actions on theoretical injury to consumers, rather than demonstrated harm.
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“Caught up in a ‘moral panic’ over IP, the FTC is trying to remedy uncertain consumer ‘harms,’ Mossoff said, while threatening innovative companies’ research-and-development-driving revenue streams. By calling the stability of intellectual property rights into question, the FTC could undermine the ‘web of commercial transactions, thousands of commercial transactions’ that go into every smartphone, ever car, and many more products. Those commercial webs depend, he said, on companies knowing whose IP is what, and what it’s worth.”