By David Golden

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has granted the motion of plaintiffs in In Re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation for final approval of class action settlements with Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Intuit for $20 million.

The court’s final approval of these settlements follows the recent announcement of another, much larger, proposed settlement in the same lawsuit with tech heavyweights Google, Apple, Intel, and Adobe Systems.  That settlement is reported to total $324 million.

The class action complaint alleges that several high-profile companies conspired to fix wages and eliminate competition for workers in high-tech industries.  The case has received considerable media attention because of allegations that Steve Jobs, the late CEO of Apple, was centrally involved in the conspiracy at both Pixar and Apple.  In an unusual twist, one of the named class representatives recently objected to the proposed settlement with Google, Apple, Intel, and Adobe.  The court has scheduled a hearing regarding preliminary approval of that settlement for June 19, 2014.

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A View from Constantine Cannon’s London Office

By Michael Petrides

The European Commission’s Competition Commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, is strongly defending the EC from charges that its proposed settlement with Google concerning search engine practices would permit Google to expand its dominant market position.

Commissioner Alumina’s defense of the proposed settlement joins a debate with Matthias Döpfner, CEO of German publishing giant Axel Springer.

This blog commented in February on Google’s proposed commitments to settle its long-running antitrust case with the EC over its search engine practices. In the meantime, and before the commitments have been “market tested,” Döpfner has launched a scathing attack against the antitrust regulator.

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By David Scupp

The NCAA was on the losing end of two orders entered this week in the In re NCAA Student Athlete Name & Likeness Licensing Litigation.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California denied the NCAA’s motion for leave to file a motion for partial reconsideration of the court’s order denying the NCAA’s motion for summary judgment on antitrust claims of current and former student-athletes who were denied compensation for the commercial use of their name, image, and likeness. The NCAA had argued that the court should reconsider its finding that providing financial support to women’s sports and less prominent men’s sports is not a legitimate procompetitive justification for the NCAA’s challenged restrictions on student-athlete pay.

In its summary judgment decision, the court held that the market for women’s sports and less prominent men’s sports is separate from the market for Division I men’s football and basketball, and found that it would be “improper to validate a practice that is decidedly in restraint of trade simply because the practice produces some unrelated benefits to competition in another market.” The court also found that this procompetitive justification failed because the record contained undisputed evidence that the NCAA could support women’s sports and less prominent men’s sports through less restrictive means.

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By Ankur Kapoor[1]

The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) and the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice will attempt to unravel the antitrust pros and cons of bundled discounts and other conditional-pricing practices in a one-day public workshop on June 23, 2014.

Bundled discounts, which are discounts offered for the purchase of a “bundle” of goods or services, exist in many markets.  The undisputed heavyweight champion of bundled discounts is the fast-food value meal, for which you pay some five cents more to get the fries (how can you say no to that?).

Although most bundled discounts are good for competition because customers love a good deal, there are cases where bundled discounts can exclude competition and, on balance, harm consumers.  For example, when a company has a monopoly in one product market (say, broadband internet service), it can raise prices in that market and then offer a “discount” only to customers that also buy some other product in a competitive market (say, telephone service).  Because customers need the monopoly product and don’t want to turn down the “discount” on that product, they end up buying the second product from the monopolist as well, to the exclusion of other companies competing in the second product market.  Even if competitors may be able to compete in the first product market, that complicates but does not eliminate the anticompetitive potential of the bundled discount.

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By Jeffery I. Shinder and David Scupp

Donald Sterling is going to find the NBA constitution a major roadblock if he attempts to fight in court the NBA’s decision to seek his ouster as owner of the Los Angeles Clippers.

Yesterday, we analyzed the antitrust implications of the NBA’s decision to respond forcefully to Sterling’s recently reported offensive and racially charged comments.  In addition to imposing a lifetime ban from NBA activities and a fine of $2.5 million, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver announced that he would urge the NBA Board of Governors to force Silver to sell his basketball team.  We concluded that while joint activity of NBA teams could raise antitrust issues under certain circumstances, it would be difficult for Sterling to prove that his particular expulsion amounted to an antitrust infraction, particularly because it is unlikely that he could show that the NBA’s action caused any competitive foreclosure or impact on price or innovation.

However, apart from the difficulties inherent in proving an antitrust claim, Sterling would also have to overcome two legal barriers contained in the NBA’s constitution, which the league recently made public in the wake of the Sterling controversy.

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