
Herbert Dow, the Monopoly Breaker (1997) - swampthing
http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=31
======
axus
This only worked because it was a commodity that could be resold without much
extra expense, and the cartel wasn't willing to sell at a loss everywhere.
Great history lesson!

~~~
rallison
That, and in the US (and many other countries), we also now have government
protections against price dumping [1]. Not to say it doesn't still happen, but
there is some recourse.

Regardless, a good read.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#Actio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_\(pricing_policy\)#Actions_in_the_United_States)

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cschmidt
I'm a kid who went to Herbert H. Dow High School in Midland, Michigan. Then I
went on to study Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan in the
Herbert H. Dow building. I'm very proud to see this story on HN. There is a
(seemingly) out of print book called "The Dow Story: The History of the Dow
Chemical Company" if anyone would like a more in depth view of the "bleach
wars" and other ways that Dow took on the entrenched German companies.

------
stfu
Great story! Actually shows that monopolies can even be broken without the
intervention of government.

~~~
georgemcbay
Shows that they could in the early 1900s. These days the specific formulation
of bromine being sold would be patented (even if they had to modify the
formulation every 17 years) and Dow would be sued for patent infringement on
the resales.

~~~
scottdw2
Actually, no they couldn't. Patents only apply to the right of "first sale".
You can resell any patented invention without the consent of the patent
holder.

~~~
AaronFriel
I think you're confusing the first-sale doctrine with exhaustion doctrine, and
the latter is, I think, a bit more confusing and unclear as to what patent
holders can require.

~~~
georgemcbay
You beat me to the reply...

Firstly, IANAL(!)

Secondly, I do follow the sorts of IP law cases that tend to show up on HN as
an interested non-legal observer because I think IP law is one of the most
dangerous problems the US tech industry faces, even though the industry is the
thing that is fucking itself most of the time.

However, from what I understand while the exhaustion doctrine has been upheld
for international copyright law recently by the Supreme Court, the same court
refused to hear a vaguely similar case as applied to patent law (and the
defendant was on the ropes and forced to settle). So there are still quite a
lot of open questions about exhaustion doctrine as it applies to patents,
especially when international trade is introduced, and also when the original
supplier preemptively imposes restrictions (such as the "not for resale" that
would certainly be on the packaging of any chemicals sold today). One
mitigating thing that might help in this situation though is that price-fixing
is often viewed as a situation where such resale restrictions can be found to
be invalid.

So, basically this is all really muddy and not entirely decided (exhaustion
doctrine is just common law to begin with) and there's no yes/no answer as to
whether my half-sarcastic statement is valid, but we do live in a world that
is very different than the early 1900s in a lot of ways, many of them for the
better, but some of them for the worse.

