Others have noted the relative increase in the Supreme Court’s patent law docket over the last two terms. An additional area of significant Supreme Court activity is antitrust - another facet of the legal framework that structures competition in our market economy.

In today’s New York Times, Linda Greenhouse summarizes the Court’s two new grants in antitrust cases. Lyle Denniston described the same grants at SCOTUSblog yesterday.

UPDATE: Tony Mauro had this story about Leegin, the minimum retail price case, back in September. Hanno Kaiser weighed in at Antitrust Review, and Josh Wright weighed in at Truth on the Market.

UPDATE 2: And here’s a fresh analysis from Thom Lambert at Truth on the Market.

Yesterday, the FTC issued a unanimous decision concluding that chiptech firm Rambus “unlawfully monopolized the markets for four computer memory technologies that have been incorporated into industry standards for dynamic random access memory — DRAM chips. DRAMs are widely used in personal computers, servers, printers, and cameras.”

Patent Hawk is all over it, at Patent Prospector.

The New York Times has the story:

The Justice Department is investigating whether a deal involving two big pharmaceutical companies and a generic drug maker thwarted a potentially lower-priced competitor for the blood thinner Plavix, one of the world’s top-selling drugs. …

Initially, Sanofi and Bristol had sued to block Apotex’s version on the ground that it violated their patent, and a trial had been scheduled to begin last month in New York. But the companies announced in March that the patent lawsuit had been settled under terms that would have involved a payment to Apotex and an agreement that the company not sell its generic version until September 2011, eight months before the United States patent for Plavix was set to expire.

This is just two paragraphs from a detailed article.  As they saying goes, read the whole thing …

There’s also a story on the same topic at the Globe & Mail.