Football players’ antitrust claims that the National Football League (“NFL”) and teams conspired to deprive them of their rights to football game footage are being kicked out of court after a federal judge found that the plaintiffs had failed to come within the Supreme Court’s holding in American Needle, Inc. v. National Football League, 130 S. Ct. 2201 (2010).

Judge Paul A. Magnusen of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota has dismissed with prejudice a putative class action antitrust lawsuit brought in Washington v. National Football League by retired NFL players against the NFL, NFL Ventures, L.P., NFL Productions, LLC, NFL Enterprises, LLC, and each of the 32 NFL teams.

The plaintiffs, former professional athletes seeking to represent a class of similarly situated individuals, alleged that the defendants monopolized the market for former players’ images and likenesses in violation of the Sherman Act by not allowing them the rights to films and images from their games.

The court found that the plaintiffs’ claims failed to come within the holding of American Needle that the NFL and its teams might, in some instances, be capable of concerted action in violation of the Sherman Act.

Specifically, Judge Magnusen found that American Needle does not support plaintiffs’ contentions because that Supreme Court decision involved intellectual property that each team owned individually.  By contrast, the intellectual property involved in this case is historical football game footage – something that the individual teams do not separately own.  Judge Magnusen found this distinction dispositive on the ground that the NFL and its teams could not be considered to have conspired with respect to property that the teams and the NFL collectively owned.

The court concluded that the plaintiffs failed to plausibly allege any antitrust violation from defendants’ conduct.  Judge Magnusen stated that “[i]f the NFL is refusing to pay Plaintiffs for the use of their images in its copyrighted material, then Plaintiffs may have a claim for a violation of their right of publicity.… What they have are claims for royalties, not claims for antitrust.  The Complaint is therefore dismissed with prejudice.”

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of plaintiff American Needle and a more expansive view of the scope of antitrust law today with what may well turn out to be a landmark opinion in the much anticipated case of American Needle, Inc. v. National Football League.

The decision rejects the lower courts’ broad grant of immunity to joint ventures from the conspiracy prohibition of § 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

American Needle, the plaintiff-petitioner and a manufacturer of NFL-licensed headwear, claimed that the NFL acted anticompetitively by granting Reebok the exclusive license for certain NFL paraphernalia.  The trial court granted summary judgment to the NFL, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed.  Both lower courts held that, in licensing individual team and NFL trademarks, the NFL was operating as a single entity under antitrust law – as opposed to multiple, collectively acting ball clubs – and thus was immune from the conspiracy prohibition of § 1 of the Sherman Act. 

The Supreme Court held unanimously that the NFL clubs are not immune from the conspiracy prohibition of the Sherman Act – at the very least with respect to licensing their intellectual property.  The Court’s language also indicates that the Court likely would hold the NFL clubs subject to the conspiracy prohibition with respect to the full panoply of the NFL’s operations.

The Court rejected the NFL’s position that, because everything the NFL does promotes NFL professional football, the NFL is really an integrated single entity immune from the conspiracy prohibition.  The Court also rejected the middle-of-the-road rule suggested by the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, which would not apply the conspiracy prohibition if “the teams and the league . . . have effectively merged the relevant aspects of their operations.” 

Most importantly, the Court took the opportunity to restate and clarify the principles governing when to apply the Sherman Act’s conspiracy prohibition.  Thus, American Needle will govern the application of antitrust law in all industries, not just professional sports, as evidenced by the submission of an amicus brief by Visa and MasterCard in the payments industry.  (Visa and MasterCard are public corporations owned by separate legal entities, including banks that were members of Visa and MasterCard when Visa and MasterCard were organized as joint ventures.) click here for more »

If the recent oral argument in American Needle, Inc. v. National Football League is any guide, the U.S. Supreme Court might just thread the needle and decide that case on a narrower, more middle-ground, basis than the Seventh Circuit decision, which raised the specter of freeing all professional sports leagues from antitrust scrutiny.

The Supreme Court heard oral argument on January 13, 2010, in the much anticipated case, which may well result in a watershed opinion in antitrust law as applied to sports leagues and joint ventures generally.

American Needle, the plaintiff-petitioner and a manufacturer of NFL-licensed headwear, claims that the NFL acted anticompetitively by granting Reebok the exclusive license for certain NFL paraphernalia.  The trial court granted summary judgment to the NFL, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed.  Both lower courts held that, in licensing individual team and NFL trademarks, the NFL is a single entity under antitrust law – as opposed to multiple, collectively acting teams – and thus not subject to the anticonspiracy prohibition of § 1 of the Sherman Act.  For more detail about the case, click here for this blog’s prior discussion.

The Supreme Court’s treatment of the NFL’s claim to be a single entity will determine the extent to which the NFL’s actions are immunized from § 1 of the Sherman Act.  (While the NFL would remain subject to the antimonopoly provisions of § 2, § 1 claims are typically easier to prove.)

At one extreme, the Court could hold that, because everything the NFL does promotes NFL professional football, the NFL is really an integrated single entity immune from the anticonspiracy prohibition.  In this scenario, the NFL could fix prices for everything:  players’ and coaches’ salaries; tickets; hats; jerseys; T-shirts; etc.  At the other extreme, the Court could hold that, because the NFL is comprised of multiple ball clubs, everything it does is subject to the anticonspiracy prohibition.  For example—in a hypothetical posed by Justice Kennedy, the likely swing vote—the antitrust laws could be used to challenge game rules providing greater protection to quarterbacks because the rules would disfavor teams with better running games.

The justices’ questioning of the lawyers indicated that the Court will likely reject both extremes. click here for more »

By Rosa M. Morales

Antitrust challenges to so-called “pay-for-delay” settlements—in which brand-name drug makers temporarily keep generics out of the market by making payments to would-be competitors—got a booster shot this week with a big victory in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

The First Circuit held on Monday that even when pay-for-delay settlements do not involve any cash payments, plaintiffs can still challenge those agreements as anticompetitive under the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in FTC v. Actavis, 133 S. Ct. 2223 (2013).  The First Circuit held in In re Loestrin 24 Fe Antitrust Litig., Nos. 14-2071, 15-1250 (1st Cir. Feb. 22, 2016), that the Actavis decision—which permits antitrust challenges to reverse-payment settlements that keep would-be generic competitors out of the market, even if the brand-name drug company holds a patent—is  not limited to agreements for cash payments.

The First Circuit’s decision revived multi-district, direct-purchaser and end-payor class actions brought against drug manufacturers Warner Chilcott, Watson Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and Lupin Pharmaceuticals, Inc., which were consolidated in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island.  The district court had dismissed claims alleging that the drug makers conspired to delay generic competition of Warner’s blockbuster oral contraceptive drug, Loestrin 24 Fe®, by striking a series of non-cash reverse-payment agreements to settle patent infringement suits, in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. §1.  The First Circuit rejected the district court’s limited reading of Actavis as excluding non-cash payments, vacated that decision, and remanded the case back to district court.

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By Seth D. Greenstein

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has reversed a jury’s verdict that a horse breeding association illegally conspired with some of its members to exclude genetically cloned horses from its elite quarter horse breeding registry, holding the plaintiffs’ circumstantial evidence was insufficient to rebut an inference of independent conduct.

The court in Abraham & Veneklasen Joint Venture v. American Quarter Horse Association also discussed, but declined to decide, whether the American Quarter Horse Association (the “AQHA”) constitutes a single entity incapable of conspiracy, or whether the independent entities comprising the association were capable of engaging in concerted action.

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