Argumentation of the Courts and Contemporary Legal Scholarship

This chapter analyzes existing U.S. Supreme Court case law with respect to, on the one hand, antitrust’s minimum resale price maintenance plans, bundling and tying practices, as well as refusals to deal, and, on the other hand, trademark law’s dilution, postsale, sponsorship, and initial interest confusion doctrines, including design patent and selected areas of copyright law. It demonstrates that courts, based on the free riding hypothesis, have come to protect increasing amounts of artificial shortage of everyday consumer goods and services and corresponding incentives to innovate. Through the preservation of such values, antitrust and intellectual property laws have evolved into “dilution laws” and have focused, almost exclusively, on the refurbishment of the technological supply side of our present-day digital economies rather than also on the human demand side of “creative consumption.”