Oxfirst Webinar: Balance Requirements for Standard Development Organizations

Our friends at Oxfirst have another exciting webinar scheduled for October 2, 2019 at 1600 to 1700 (British Standard Time) titled, “’Balance’ Requirements for Standards Development Organizations: A Debate between Professor Contreras and Professor Larouche.”  

Here is a description of the webinar:

“Antitrust and Balance of Interests in Standards Development - Lessons from NSS Labs v. Symantec”

The recent decision of the District Court of the Northern District of California, in NSS Labs. v. Symantec sheds light on the requirement that Standard Development Organizations (SDO) achieve a balance of interests in their procedures. Whilst the court ultimately did not rule on this point, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) intervened in the case to insist – correctly in our view – that SDOs must meet that requirement in order to benefit from protection against antitrust liability under the Standard Development Organization Advancement Act (SDOAA).

Here are brief bios of the speakers: 

Professor Jorge Contreras

Jorge Contreras is a Presidential Scholar and Professor of law at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.  He holds a JD from Harvard Law School, all conferred with honors.  Prior to entering academia, Prof. Contreras was a partner in the Boston, London and Washington DC offices of the international law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. His current research focuses on intellectual property transactions, standard setting and science policy. He has edited six books and published more than 100 scholarly articles on these topics, and has received numerous awards for his scholarship and teaching. His latest books include the 2-volume edited series, The Cambridge Handbook of Technical Standardization Law (2018, 2019). He has been quoted in the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, Washington Post, and Korea Times, has been a guest on NPR, BBC and various televised broadcasts, and his work has been cited favorably by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, European Commission and courts in the U.S. and Europe. 

Professor Pierre Larouche

Pierre Larouche (1968) is Professor of Law and Innovation at Université de Montréal, where he is in charge of the new PhD Programme on Innovation, Science, Technology and Law. Until 2017, he was Professor of Competition Law at Tilburg University (Netherlands), where he founded and directed the Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC) and created the Bachelor Global Law. Prof. Larouche has also taught at the College of Europe (Bruges) (2004-2016), and he has been a guest professor or scholar at McGill University (2002), National University of Singapore (2004, 2006, 2008, 2011, 2013), Northwestern University (2009-2010, 2016-2017), Sciences Po (2012), the University of Pennsylvania (2015) and the Inter-Disciplinary Center (IDC, 2016). His research centers around economic governance, and in particular how law and regulation struggle to deal with complex phenomena such as innovation. He follows a meta-comparative and inter-disciplinary method. He currently teaches competition law, economic regulation, tort law as well as patents and trademarks.

Registration is free and available here:  https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5539834762562087947

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