Thanks, Mq., for your incisive and, yes, entertaining, treatise on tying and bundling.
I agree that all transactions are ephemeral monopolies. The law doesn't care about that kind, only the more noxious permanent ones in which the monopolist uses his advantage unfairly.
And, yes, the name of the game is defining the relevant market. You would not believe the amount of time, i.e., billable hours, expended on getting the definition correct. And these king's ransoms are valuable indeed and are money well spent because achieving the "correct" definition means lots and lots of cash, a lot more cash than the lawyers ever see placed in their bank accounts.
Like Q's IPR, legal acumen and talent are elements of intellectual capital that yield nowhere near the cash that they are worth. It's a truth I try every day to get my clients to accept.
Ask Irwin how much Q would be worth without Altman scheming and finagling and playing three-dimensional legal chess with the brightest lawyers on the planet. And like CDMA IPRs, we are not compensated near enough for what we do because without us the whole edifice would fall. Heck, if it had not been for the magical partnership of Jacobs, engineer, Viterbi, Kleinhouse, et alia, and Altman and his legal eagles, you might still be selling fossil fuels. |
