Reed Smith Partner Stephen Murphy Talks FTC and Unfair Competition Enforcement

This post was written by Stephen P. Murphy.

I was fortunate to be invited as a guest commentator on The Washington Legal Foundation’s video blog, Legally Brief, about the significance of the recent settlement of the Federal Trade Commission v. Intel Corp. administrative complaint. The complaint appears to presage a return of the FTC to active Section 5 enforcement, with challenges to conduct not now prohibited by the Sherman or Clayton Acts. FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz (then Commissioner) urged this very development in his concurrence to the issuance of the Rambus complaint in 2006. The settlement for Intel is somewhat of an extension of its settlement last year with AMD (which included a payment of $1.25 billion), but it does go further to extend benefits to other competitors and to broaden the scope of Intel’s forbearance from patent infringement cases.