Refinement of antitrust laws may be brewing

"It is the possibility of success in the marketplace, attributable to superior performance, that provides the incentive on which the proper functioning of our competitive economy rests. If a firm that has engaged in the risks and expenses of research and development were required to share with its rivals the benefits of those endeavors, this incentive would likely be vitiated." If that sounds like the standard Chamber of Commerce description of how private enterprise is supposed to work, it isn't. It's actually one of the major findings by the chief judge of the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City when the court reversed most of a lower court's findings in one of the largest private antitrust cases in U.S. history—Berkey Photo vs. Eastman Kodak. But beyond the Kodak case and an important regulatory case—the Federal Trade Commission's administrative action against Du Pont's allegedly illegal dominance of the titanium dioxide pigments market—a ...