Me, Justice Stevens, and the Dublin Marathon

posted by Spencer Waller

Here is a sentence I never expected to write. So there I was on Monday in the middle of running the Dublin Marathon when I decided to listen on my Ipod to a C-Span podcast interview with Justice Stevens. I had traveled to Dublin to run the actual Dublin marathon and to co-host Antitrust Marathon IV: Marathon with Authority, a round table discussion co-hosted with the British Institute of International and Comparative Law and the Irish Competition Authority.

Around Mile 11, I was hurting and turned from a combination of Irish rock and random songs to some pod casts. After some short New York Times and NPR pod casts, I remembered that I had downloaded a series of C-Span interviews with the current Justices and Sandra Day O’Connor.

I have a special fondness for Justice Stevens. We are both Chicagoans, Cub Fans, and Northwestern Law grads. More improbably, we even had the same antitrust professor (James Rahl) at Northwestern, albeit about 35 years apart. That plus the fact he was primarily an antitrust litigator before going on the bench was enough to get me to devote the next 30 some minutes, and about 3 miles, to the Stevens interview.

A lot of it was a fluffy discussion of his chambers and personal history. But mixed among the fluff and the questions for non-lawyers (What is certiorari?), there were a handful of interesting tidbits. Justice Stevens talked about the reasons and impact of not participating in the cert pool, the importance of writing his own first drafts, and his interest in having the court hear a few more cases than its current docket. There are no smoking guns or shocking revelations, but Justice Stevens does mention the need for Justices from diverse legal backgrounds, such as veterans and litigators, as an important mix for the Court to have on the bench. Justice Stevens is of course both and as far as I know the only current Justice to actually have made his living as a litigator.

The main thing I came away with was the genuine niceness of the good Justice which was my impression from the only time I ever met him. In 1993, I taught in a summer program in Innsbruck, Austria where Justice Stevens was lecturing. Instead of staying for the three days as promised, he stayed and lectured the entire week and interacted warmly with the students and the rest of the faculty. At one point, a student asked him to sign the packet of course materials which he did after class. Because he did not want to play favorites, he then stayed and patiently signed for more than a hundred students.

In the pod cast interview, Stevens demurred on picking a most important or favorite case. But when asked about a most memorable experience, he didn’t hesitate and proudly mentioned throwing out the first pitch at Wrigley Field before a Cubs game at the age of 85.

With that, I grinned, quickened my pace a bit, and headed up the next of an endless series of hills on my way around Dublin on a surprisingly warm and sunny late October day.

I have not listened to the rest of the interviews. But if anyone else has, please post if there are particularly revealing or interesting moments.

  October 28, 2009 at 2:15 pm  Tags: Antitrust, baseball, Chicago Cubs, Dublin, John Paul Stevens, marathon, Supreme Court, Wrigley Field  Posted in: Antitrust, Interviews, Supreme Court   Print This Post   6 Comments

Academic Books, Non-Academic Books, BitTorrent, and Google’s Brand Power

posted by Deven Desai

D is for Digital is over now. I urge anyone interested in the Google Book Deal (aka the Google Book Search) to check out the schedule page and the webcast links (the stream links are at the top of the Friday and Saturday schedules respectively). James Grimmelmann put together a conference that aired out pro and con views rather well. In fact, I’d say although many were questioning the deal, I learned a good amount about the views of those in favor of the deal. I was not convinced that the deal is good and should go forward, but I appreciated hearing more about how the deal evolved and defenders’ views.

I highly recommend the keynote lunch with Pam Samuelson and Paul Courant. That panel warmed up the group. Some really good questions about transparency of the process, responsibility, and more came up. Pam’s key point that if one builds a pubic good this big, public trust responsibilities go with it was dead on for me. I highly recommend watching the video for all that was said.

The next panel C is for Culture was excellent. James asked a question that has been on my mind and we had kicked around at WIP IP last week. Is Google Book Search irrelevant?

Here is why that is good question. First, the day so far emphasized that the majority of the books in question are academic books. As Pam explained and Paul Duguid echoed, if scholars’ books are at stake, scholars should be involved. Paul made clear that scholarly standards should guide the project.

Now, consider that many books are becoming available on BitTorrent. In addition, one panelist, Dan Reetz has a fascinating project. His DIYscanner project is a wild moment in grassroots digital activism. The story of how he chose to build his low-cost, open source DIY scanner (we’re talking maybe $300-$400 total) so that one could scan personal (and other books) at the rate of a few seconds per page and without destroying the book merits another post. (for now here is a link to the plans to build your own scanner) In addition, Reetz noted that majority of new books are leaked prepublication. As a general matter, a key claim is that users will pay for a book but copy the book so that they can search and take many books with them. The importance of these changes is that crowd-sourced and other approaches to digitizing text is on the move. One can see this shift as indicating market failure or that ereader functionality will be more and more the case.

As scanners, ereaders, and companies like Stanza offer better ways to access, search, mark, and read, the walled or controlled version of the text experience that the Google Book Deal offers seems odd. I doubt, however, that it will be irrelevant. Google’s brand, the ease of searching (even with its errors so far), and the ability to trust Google over BitTorrent or other sources will likely make it relevant to many. Nonetheless, the growth in alternative sources would suggest that Google will need to choose between a web search that captures all useful book offerings or a Google Book Search that only gives Google Book results. As the last panel on antitrust explored, Google is already dominant in search. It arguably killed a little company called MapQuest. Once Google offered its maps and its maps became the default listing when one entered address information into the search, MapQuest was done. That seems awfully close to the MS bundling issues of the last decade. When it comes to books, Google’s lead and dominance will give it massive power and leverage over how we all access knowledge. Nonetheless, it may be that grassroots, crowd-sourced movements will permit an end around for the control the publishers want through this deal. To be clear an end-around is insufficient protection against the lock-in problems the Google Book Deal poses, but it may help push Google to reach a deal that is less run by publisher interests.

  October 12, 2009 at 7:40 am  Tags: Antitrust, DIY scanner, Goog, Google, Google Book Settlement  Posted in: Google & Search Engines, Intellectual Property, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   One Comment

Antitrust in Obamaland

posted by Spencer Waller

Antitrust enforcement was one area where most observers expected significant changes from the Bush years, particularly at the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department. For the past eight years, the Antitrust Division had vigorously prosecuted cartels, but had not been active in monopolization or merger enforcement. In addition to bringing relatively few cases in these areas, the Division had filed a number of amicus briefs in support of defendants, opposed a petition for certiorari sought by its sister agency the Federal Trade Commission, and issued a number of reports and policy recommendations that restricted the reach of the antitrust laws or imposed significant burdens on private plaintiffs. During this same period, the FTC proved to be more active in the competition area, particularly in the health care and intellectual property fields which suggests that the FTC will have a greater continuity in the competition area despite key changes at the Commissioner and staff levels.

The key officials in the Obama administration came into the antitrust agencies promising change. Christine Varney, the new head of the Antitrust Division, gave a speech in her early days promising more vigorous enforcement and hearkening back to the days of Thurman Arnold during the latter half of the New Deal. At the same time, she repudiated a highly restrictive report on monopoly power issued during the waning days of the prior administration issued by the Justice Department alone because a majority of the FTC had refused to endorse. In addition, the Division has reversed policy and filed an amicus brief in support of plaintiffs in a key Supreme Court case involving the pharmaceutical industry. Most recently, the Justice Department and the FTC jointly announced a new initiative to revisit the Merger Guidelines of the 1990s used by both agencies to decide which mergers and acquisitions to challenge on competition grounds. Read the rest of this post »

  October 1, 2009 at 12:57 pm  Tags: Antitrust, DOJ, FTC, Live Nation, Obama administration, Ticket Master  Posted in: Antitrust, Consumer Protection Law, Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments