Artisan fishers broke the early medieval pattern of subsistence fishing. Participants in Europe’s medieval ‘Commercial Revolution’, artisans made their living by catching fish to sell on a local market. Evidence of such people appears around 1000 CE in commercially precocious northern Italy but also in England, France, the Rhineland, and elsewhere. Commonly they arose at or near emerging towns, where skilled subsistence fishers might offer a surplus catch to other non-agricultural specialists. The chapter examines the social position of these household-based fishers, their traditional small-scale technologies, and the collective organizations (guilds) used to manage their human and environmental relations. It then turns to the urban markets where these men and their wives provided fresh fish from nearby waters. In larger towns professional fishmongers consolidated catches from various regional habitats, while communal concern for a safe and abundant supply caused municipal authorities to regulate market dealings. By the late twelfth century the interplay of seasonal demand (Lent) and supply (runs of migratory fish) coupled with cultural criteria of taste and quality shaped fish prices. Whether in great cities like Venice or Paris or small towns on the Castilian plateau or English coast, local markets offered consumers the regional fish they ate.

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith observed that “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” As we will see, Smith’s warning has stood the test of time. Over 240 years later, we find such conspiracies among physicians, hospitals, pharmaceutical manufacturers, medical device producers, and health insurers. Their contrivances to raise prices add billions of dollars to our expenditures on health care. In this chapter, we introduce an economic model of a price-fixing cartel and discuss the deleterious effects on price, quantity, and social welfare. Using health care examples, we discuss collusion among physicians to deny staff privileges, noncompete agreements among hospitals, and market division schemes in the health insurance sector.

Chaptr 25 offers a survey of the many ways in which antitrust and competition law affect IP licensing transactions. It begins with a brief overview of US antitrust law and enforcement and distinguishes between per se liability and liability under the rule of reason. It then considers how antitrust authorities have viewed IP transations, beginning with the Nine No-Nos (1970) and more recent agency pronouncements. The chapter then describes specific antitrust doctrines that impact IP transactions: price fixing, market allocation (US v. Topco), resale price maintenance (Leegin v PSKS), tying (Siegel v. Chicken Delight), monopolization (Illinois Tool Works v. Indep. Ink), refusals to deal (The Movie 1 & 2), standard setting (Allied Tube v. Indian Head), reverse payment settlements (FTC v. Actavis).