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Even more on American Needle

By Rick Karcher, Michael McCann, Geoffrey Rapp, Greg Skidmore, and Howard Wasserman

For even more on American Needle, I have a column up on the Huffington Post discussing some of the common misconceptions surrounding the case.

Here's an excerpt:

This case is a lottery ticket for the NFL. If they win, it could be a significant victory....If the NFL loses, nothing really changes. The issue before the Supreme Court is not whether the NFL's exclusive licensing arrangement is legal under the antitrust laws. The issue is whether the licensing arrangement should even be subject to scrutiny under the antitrust laws. If the NFL wins, they escape Section 1 scrutiny. If the NFL loses, their arrangement will then be analyzed under the rule of reason, where a court will weigh the pro-competitive benefits of the agreement versus its anticompetitive effects.

There is no reason to believe that the Supreme Court's rejection of the single entity argument makes it any more (or less) likely that American Needle would prevail in the underlying antitrust case (or that a suit against the NFL's exclusive deal with EA would be successful). Rather, it only subjects the NFL to the same antitrust scrutiny they have been subjected to for the last 50 years. American Needle could win the underlying case, but only if it could prove that the anticompetitive effects of the NFL's exclusive apparel licensing deal outweighed its pro-competitive benefits.

Full post as published by Sports Law Blog on January 11, 2010 (boomark / email).