UK Competition Appeal Tribunal Rules on OFT’s Duty to Refer Mergers for Investigation

On 3 December 2003, the Competition Appeal Tribunal in the UK upheld an application by IBA Health Ltd for judicial review against the Office of Fair Trading\u27s decision not to refer the anticipated merger between iSoft Plc and Torex Plc to the Competition Commissionfor detailed investigation. This is the first case under the new merger control provisions in the Enterprise Act 2002 to come before the Tribunal for judicial review under Section 120 of that Act

Judicial review of mergers

After the significant and much publicised appeals heard by the EC courts in 2002 and early 2003, 2004 has been a quieter year for judicial review of merger cases. Nevertheless, 2004 has seen judgments and opinions that further develop EC merger control law, albeit largely on procedural points. On the substantive side, Advocate General Tizzano delivered his opinion1 in the appeal against the judgment of the Court of First Instance (‘CFI’) in the Tetra Laval case, where he focused on the standard of proof required in Commission merger decisions and the scope of permissible judicial review of those decisions. The eagerly awaited judgments of the European Court of Justice (‘ECJ’) in the Tetra Laval case3 and also of the CFI in GE’s challenge to the GE/Honeywell prohibition4 and in WorldCom/MCI5 will provide further guidance on the scope of judicial review, as well as on the substantive appraisal of mergers. In the meantime, the Commission has pressed forward with its overhaul of the EC merger review system. Whilst these reforms were initiated with the publication of the Green Paper prior to the defeats sustained by the Commission at the CFI, the need for reform became clear as a result of the dramatic events of 2002. With the reforms it has now put in place, the Commission is hoping to address some of the criticisms voiced in recent years

Neural Video Compression with Temporal Layer-Adaptive Hierarchical B-frame Coding

Neural video compression (NVC) is a rapidly evolving video coding research area, with some models achieving superior coding efficiency compared to the latest video coding standard Versatile Video Coding (VVC). In conventional video coding standards, the hierarchical B-frame coding, which utilizes a bidirectional prediction structure for higher compression, had been well-studied and exploited. In NVC, however, limited research has investigated the hierarchical B scheme. In this paper, we propose an NVC model exploiting hierarchical B-frame coding with temporal layer-adaptive optimization. We first extend an existing unidirectional NVC model to a bidirectional model, which achieves -21.13% BD-rate gain over the unidirectional baseline model. However, this model faces challenges when applied to sequences with complex or large motions, leading to performance degradation. To address this, we introduce temporal layer-adaptive optimization, incorporating methods such as temporal layer-adaptive quality scaling (TAQS) and temporal layer-adaptive latent scaling (TALS). The final model with the proposed methods achieves an impressive BD-rate gain of -39.86% against the baseline. It also resolves the challenges in sequences with large or complex motions with up to -49.13% more BD-rate gains than the simple bidirectional extension. This improvement is attributed to the allocation of more bits to lower temporal layers, thereby enhancing overall reconstruction quality with smaller bits. Since our method has little dependency on a specific NVC model architecture, it can serve as a general tool for extending unidirectional NVC models to the ones with hierarchical B-frame coding

PHARMABULLETIN Issue 3, Fall 2005

On August 15, 2005, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Association of American Medical Colleges released a joint report that examines possible steps to accelerate drug discovery and development. The report, entitled Drug Development Science: Obstacles and Opportunities for Collaboration Among Academia, Industry and Government, is the product of a two-day conference among leaders from the pharmaceutical industry, academia, and FDA. The goal of the conference and the report was to explore means of overcoming the high failure rate for tentative drug candidates

Pharma Bulletin - Spring 2005

FDA to Create Drug Safety Board In February 2005, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it will create a new independent Drug Safety Oversight Board (DSB) to oversee the management of drug safety issues within the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER). The FDA Commissioner will appoint individuals from the FDA and medical experts from other Health and Human Services agencies and government departments to the DSB, which also will consult with other medical experts and patient and consumer group representatives. Additionally, the FDA is proposing a new “Drug Watch” web page for emerging data and risk information, and anticipates an increased use of information sheets written for healthcare professionals and patients. Because of the potential concerns associated with disseminating emerging information prior to regulatory action, the agency has stated it will solicit public input. The FDA will issue draft guidance on procedures and criteria for identifying drugs and information for the Drug Watch web page

PHARMABULLETIN Issue 2, Summer 2005

In May 2005, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued draft guidance on the type of information to be posted on its new “Drug Watch” website—a site intended to identify drugs for which it is actively evaluating early safety signals. At this time, the FDA plans only to post information on drug products regulated by the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, therefore vaccines, blood products and medical devices shall be excluded

The Article 82 EC Abuse Concept: What Scope is There for Modernization?

On 30 September 2004, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, the University of Nyenrode, and Global Competition Review co-sponsored a seminar on the reform of Article 82 EC by the European Commission. The seminar raised a great deal of interest amongst members of the legal community and attracted a large attendance. The speakers included some of the most well-known top-level policy makers, academics, and practitioners in the field of competition law. Over the last two years, there have been numerous calls for modernization of the way in which Article 82 of the EC Treaty is applied by the European Commission and, with decentralization in mind, by 25 national competition authorities and many more national courts. Modernization in other areas has involved a greater focus on the economic effects of the relevant practice. In Article 82 EC cases, enforcement has, however, been more based on the perceived object of a criticized practice with the effect being inferred from market power. Classic positions on fidelity market power. Classic positions on fidelity rebates and the special responsibilities of dominant companies have also been reaffirmed recently by the European Court in judgments such as Michelin II, Masterfoods II, and BA/Virgin. The aim of the seminar was to look at the concepts underlying the current law in relation to rebates and tying and bundling to compare how EU and US enforcers deal with such issues and to make suggestions for possible European Commission guidelines on Article 82 EC enforcement practice

Antitrust and Competition Law Update: Tetra Laval--A landmark judgement on EC Merger Control

On 15 February 2005, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) dismissed the European Commission’s appeal in the Tetra Laval/Sidel merger case.2 The ECJ’s judgment establishes two significant principles that apply beyond the facts of this particular case:The judgment confirms that the Court of First Instance (CFI) for all practical purposes will continue to be the ultimate arbiter of disputes about the Commission’s use of evidence and economic assessment in merger control proceedings. The ECJ has signaled that it will generally not entertain appeals asserting that the CFI engaged in excessive scrutiny of the Commission’s assessment and therefore overstepped the permissible boundaries of judicial review. Had the ECJ upheld the arguments raised by the Commission, this may well have had a chilling effect on the CFI’s willingness to subject the Commission’s merger decisions to strict scrutiny. This in turn would have severely limited the effectiveness of judicial review, in particular in the age of the Commission’s “more economicsbased approach” and the increasing importance of complex factual and economic evidence in merger cases. • While the judgment does not preclude prohibition of conglomerate mergers under the Merger Regulation, it imposes stringent legal and practical constraints on the Commission’s ability to challenge such mergers on the basis of “leveraging”- type theories of competitive harm: Finding that “the chains of cause and effect [underlying leveraging theories] are dimly discernible, uncertain, and difficult to establish”, the ECJ required a particularly high quality of evidence to support a conclusion that the leveraging developments will occur following the merger. By requiring that the Commission examine on a case-by-case basis whether behavioral commitments (such as not to bundle different products) might be effective, the ECJ’s judgment makes it less likely that the Commission will pursue leveraging theories in merger review. The judgment effectively compels the Commission to reassess its method of evaluating commitments, which currently calls for the rejection of even the most carefully crafted long-term behavioral commitments that adequately address conglomerate concerns