As you point out, it's pretty accepted in the copyright industry to have exclusivity deals. If I want to get Katy Perry's album, then I buy the Capitol records one, I can't get it from Sony. Or I can only stream on services where that artist is available, so if it's not on Tidal, then tough luck for users of that service.
But that doesn't mean the courts will side with me and not you. Strict logical coherence isn't always adhered to. It's even been called "the hobgoblin of little minds" - so perhaps Emerson would take your side on this.
You don't make the mattresses yourselves, you purchase from a manufacturer and sell in your storefront. There are only a few different mattress manufacturers.
Your rival, instead of adjusting prices or organizing better marketing, simply plays the manufacturers not to sell to your store for six months.
Unless you can rapidly find a brand new source of mattresses or have a very healthy rainy day fund, you will likely go under fairly quickly after selling your remaining stock.
This leaves only one store in town, and they can set the price to whatever they want. Now that they are the only established incumbent they can easily recreate this scenario with any new mattress stores that want to open in your city.
Now the people of your city have only one store for mattresses, and have to pay whatever is asked for. This is not because the business did anything especially well to win more customers, or because you did anything wrong. They simply destroyed the competition through anti-competitive behavior and have negatively affected everyone else in your area.
This is why it is illegal.
As well, although this may not contradict what you intended to say: patents, for example, precisely grant "the right to exclude." Exclusive territories are a frequent way to do this. So in that case, it isn't necessarily illegal.
With console video games, you can’t just pop the game disc into any disc tray that plays games. You can’t run your downloaded Xbox game on the PlayStation. The thing you licensed (since we don’t own them technically) is tied to proprietary hardware.
Imagine if you had to own a Mac in order to listen to your music you bought on iTunes/Apple Music
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/support-for-rights...
Imagine if any music I buy on bandcamp could only be played via a bandcamp app or software on bandcamp’s proprietary hardware.
Sure, its great for 'consumers', but it won't be long term. Will Xbox require mandatory three year game pass or onstar when you buy it? Would that be an antitrust violation?
The sherman act starts by saying "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal. "
Couple things:
1. Because it's a federal statute, it has to be within congress's powers, which is why it only applies to interstate trade/commerce, rather than purely intrastate.
2. All contracts are a restraint of trade of some form. So this was a bad codification of common law.
This immediately led to judges adding words (IE finding only contracts that "unduly" restrain trade are void).
It has only gotten worse in the past century.
So when you say "in the 80's they decided to repeal it from the bench", this is right, but it would also be fair to say "judges were forced to try to interpret this thing for a century because it was badly written, and some eventually decided the earlier interpretations were wrong".
Congress could have fixed all this at any point.
I don't follow... how is this true? "I will give you X and you will give me Y" is a contract right? What is it restraining either party from doing?
This is incorrect. They may violate anti-trust but usually don't.
exclusive contracts between manufacturers and suppliers, or between manufacturers and dealers, are generally lawful because they improve competition among the brands of different manufacturers
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
So, as a copyright holder you have the "right to exclude" granted by law - but not to coordinate with other rights holders to distort the market when exercising that right.
"Blocking rights" or "negative options" would therefore seem to be illegal, in line with this decision. [Edit: no wait; there's no coordinate between more than two parties here, as there was with Apple negotiating with all copyright holders at once to coordinate a higher price. Changed my mind]
The judicial idea that suddenly took hold forty years ago (after the xerox prosecution that killed xerox dead in the seventies) that consumers have to be harmed immediately not merely by reducing competition which would harm them in time, was very "motivated thinking" in my view. Japan was soaring, so suddenly our monopolists might be thugs but they were our thugs.
BTW, the historical rubric for such law is "restraint of trade." This was common law in Britain and its colonies long before the Sherman Act (which reduced the penalies for it and at least reduced the chance of tort remedies. Sherman's brother - a general - was also a civic railway executive.)
What? How do monopolies help the consumer?
In fact the government is nothing else but a very large version of this, a big monopolist who solves a collective action problem.
MySpace in 2007 had 80% of social network traffic, turns out it could not do what it wanted. Advanced tech economies generally consist of monopolists replacing each other, not bazaar economies.
It may still be possible to beat a monopoly by being extremely good and aggressive right on time when your competitor is napping. e.g. Firefox and Chrome vs IE. If IE team hadn't been dismantled and added tabs and other UI features, worked on performance and security improvement, we may have been using IE 25.
Less risk than if they weren't monopolies, which is the entire point.
Not necessarily, especially if the switching cost is too high. For example, if Microsoft does something monopolistic, which they had done, people aren't going to switch to Linux. Therefore the government had to step in.
Shareholder democracy does not count.
1. The arrangement in question relates to trade of copyrighted works; which means that any antitrust lawsuit has to jump over the hurdle of not restraining the copyright monopoly. Separability of copyright and exclusive licensing are also considered to be well-established components of the copyright monopoly.
2. The consumer welfare standard is so high a bar to antitrust enforcement that a lot of clearly illegal behavior is never prosecuted.
That last one deserves more explanation. In the 1980s a bunch of federal judges decided to repeal US antitrust law from the bench. They argued - with scant evidence - that antitrust action had to prove that consumers were harmed by monopolistic action. This is the exact same argument Apple and console vendors use to justify locking down their products; that it actually benefits consumers to have to buy their software from sources authorized by the hardware manufacturer.
In practice, there is no monopoly that does not improve consumer welfare. Monopolies are the most stable business arrangement and can bully the rest of the economy into doing what the customer wants. The whole point of antitrust is that we don't want to live under privately-owned government, not that avocados could be 2 cents cheaper.