Posts Tagged: "FTC"

The Council for Innovation Promotion (C4IP) submitted its comments on the recent Listening Sessions hosted by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) on lowering drug prices in an August 15 letter addressed to Meredyth Andrus, an attorney in the Health Care Division, Bureau of Competition, at the FTC.

Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sent a series of seven warning letters to several pharmaceutical companies renewing the agency’s challenge to dozens of patent listings in the U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s (FDA) Approved Drug Products with Therapeutic Equivalence Evaluations, also known as the Orange Book. The FTC’s redoubled effort to improve consumer access to generic drugs by removing patent listings from the FDA’s list of approved New Drug Applications (NDAs), which continues under the FTC’s new Republican leadership, targets inhaler and drug delivery device patents without addressing decades of calls from the pharmaceutical industry seeking clarity on the guidelines for listing device patents in the Orange Book.

A 2024 Republican election victory marks the end of the four-year Neo-Brandeisian antitrust experiment at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department Of Justice (DOJ). Spearheaded by FTC chair Lina Khan and DOJ attorney general for antitrust Jonathan Kanter, their movement sought to upend antitrust’s longstanding bipartisan consumer welfare-focused consensus. Instead, they focused on punishing businesses for bigness; opposing mergers and other business practices based on speculative rather than probable theories that of competitive harm; and orienting antitrust toward policy considerations outside economic competition, such as income redistribution, labor, and environmentalism.

On Monday, September 30, U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, sent a letter  to Robert Califf, Commissioner of the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), urging the agency to issue guidelines clarifying requirements for listing patents covering FDA-approved drugs in the agency’s Orange Book. Cassidy’s letter criticizes the FDA’s inaction in response to industry pleas for clarity, calling for quick action to address confusion created by the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) recent enforcement campaign against allegedly improper Orange Book patent listings.

Following a decision in July in which U.S. District Judge Ada Brown of the Northern District of Texas granted a preliminary injunction for global tax service provider Ryan LLC against the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) final rule banning non-compete provisions in U.S. employment contracts, the court has now set aside the FTC’s rule nationwide.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, No. 22-1219, 2024 WL 3208360 (U.S. June 28, 2024) overturned the Chevron doctrine, under which courts generally deferred to agency interpretations of their rulemaking authority. Some may have viewed that decision as the death-knell for the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) attempt to ban non-competes earlier this year. Indeed, Loper was cited to in the recent Ryan LLC decision, where a federal court in Texas enjoined the enforcement of the FTC ban. But just days ago, another federal court in Pennsylvania, while adhering to Loper, reached the opposite conclusion and declined to enjoin the ban.

On July 23, U.S. District Judge Kelley B. Hodge of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania published a memorandum denying a preliminary injunction requested by ATS Tree Services, which sought to prevent enforcement of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) recent rule banning non-compete clauses from U.S. employment contracts. The ruling comes a few weeks after injunctive relief was granted to another plaintiff by the Northern District of Texas, setting up a potential split among regional circuit courts over the FTC’s authority to target non-competes as a form of unfair competition.

Last week, just before the holiday weekend, U.S. District Judge Ada Brown of the Northern District of Texas issued a memorandum opinion supporting the entry of a preliminary injunction against the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) final rule banning non-compete provisions from U.S. employment contracts. While the requested relief is limited to the plaintiffs named in the action, the ruling marks an important victory for business interests opposing the rule and intellectual property advocates warning about likely harms to trade secret protection within the United States.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) screwed up. At least that’s how it explains what it calls the “lock[ed] in exploitative business models and monopoly power” of today’s internet giants. It blames “delayed government action.” But the agency says it won’t allow the same thing to happen with artificial intelligence (AI). With AI, the FTC “plan[s] on using the full scope of [its] authority to make sure that history does not repeat itself.”       

Despite the basic principles that a patent does not presume market power and does establish plenary legality within its issued scope, as we learned in Part I of this two-part series, the Federal Trade Commission can and has used threats of antitrust inquiries to coerce patent owners to voluntarily forego some activities within the scope of a patent’s right to exclude.  

On April 30, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it was expanding its campaign against allegedly improper patent listings in the U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s (FDA) Orange Book. In letters to 10 pharmaceutical companies, the FTC disputed the relevancy of more than 300 patents protecting aspects of drugs that have received market approval from the FDA. While the FTC claims that such action is necessary to improve Americans’ access to affordable prescription drugs, pharmaceutical industry representatives have questioned the propriety of this enforcement campaign given two decades of requests from industry stakeholders for greater clarity on Orange Book listings.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission today voted in a Special Open Commission Meeting to publish and approve a final version of the January 2023 proposed rule that would ban employers from using clauses for their employees. Today’s rule allows existing non-competes to remain in force for senior executives but bans new non-competes for all workers and makes existing non-competes for all other workers unenforceable after the effective date, which is 120 days after publication in the Federal Register.

Federal Trade Commission (FTC)  Chair Lina Khan announced yesterday that there will be a Special Open Commission Meeting held on April 23 to vote on whether to issue a final version of the January 2023 proposed rule that would ban employers from using noncompete clauses for their employees. “The proposed final rule being considered would generally prevent most employers from using noncompete clauses,” said the Open Commission Meeting’s event description. “As the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking explained, noncompetes are a widespread and often exploitative practice that suppresses wages, hampers innovation, and blocks entrepreneurs from starting new businesses.”

The protection of privilege in communications between clients and lawyers is a very important one under U.S. law. The basic rule is that when a client seeks legal advice from a lawyer, the communication between the client and the lawyer is confidential and cannot be discovered during litigation. An important purpose of this rule is to encourage clients to communicate fully and freely with lawyers in the process of seeking legal help. The lawyers here include both external lawyers and in-house lawyers.