Chillin'Competition

Competition is tough nowadays, even in competition law blogging!

Check this out:

Some weeks ago, when introducing “THE RAID”, we wrote the following:

“In Chilling Competition we have devoted a number of posts to antitrust-related movies (see our previous posts on: “First ever Hollywood competition law movie?”; “More competition-related entertainment“; “OFT goes to Hollywood”, and, very specially, our nominations to the “Antitrust Oscars”). Given that all of those posts received a crazy amount of visits, we can reasonably presume that you too like this sort of videos.”

This afternoon, one of our readers sent us a link to CPI´s September Antitrust Chronicle, where we see that CPI has created its “First CPI Film Festival”. Does this sound familiar?

Not only the concept “sort of” ressembles our “Antitrust Oscars”, but the films are also the same ones that we had referred to in our previous posts, and that you had referred to in previous comments.

It´s nice to know that even though CPI Blogs o´Blogs has tipically “boycotted” our posts (with one exception; Nico had already referred to this in the past), their ideas and tastes are so strikingly similar to ours!

Our competition lawyers mindsets lead us to the conclusion that there´s not much that can be done here since this situation can be regarded as either

a) a case of Conscious Parallelism (CPI) in an oligopolistic setting where CPI´s conduct can be qualified as a follow-the-leader reaction?  😉

or

b) a situation in which the content of our most visited posts must be regarded as an essential facility that needs to be shared with competitors.