ONLY antitrust policy promotes innovation AND consumer interest

Herbert J., Ben V. & Dorothy Willie Professor, University of Iowa College of Law. "Antitrust and the Patent System: A Reexamination" (2015). All Faculty Scholarship. 1820. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1820

Antitrust policy responded to a half century of overreaching by developing extremely strict rules for establishing competitive harm. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing to this day, antitrust has undergone a revolution in thinking that has disciplined and narrowed its focus and made its rules more consistent with its underlying goals. Patent law would benefit significantly from such a process—one that reflects consumer interests more strongly and that takes our economic knowledge of innovation and its relationship to competition and economic growth more fully into account. Today, the one enormous advantage that antitrust law has over patent law is that it confronts the economic question of impact on competition directly and explicitly, often dismissing complaints when harm to competition cannot be shown. Patent law needs to take a page from this playbook.