Refusals To License Intellectual Property

Economic analysis rarely appears on the judicial horizon in intellectual property litigation. In competition cases, by contrast, economists are familiar figures in the courtroom and the language of economics is scattered throughout the judgments of even the highest courts. One might expect, therefore, that refusals to license intellectual property would generate the same fruitful symbiosis between law and economics when those refusals surface in competition proceedings. This however, has not been how the law on this subject has developed in most jurisdictions. Courts and enforcement agencies faced with a unilateral refusal to license have instead tended to retreat into sketchily articulated black letter rules and presumptions which then have to be fenced off from the rest of competition law by economically irrelevant qualifications and distinctions based on private law categorisations of, and rationales for, individual intellectual property rights. This bypassing of case-by-case analysis in favour of more traditional modes of legal reasoning is not entirely the fault of lawyers. Economists have contributed to this state of affairs by urging judges and regulators to convert empirically undernourished theories about the proper role of intellectual property in a market economy into rules of law and evidentiary presumptions intended to be binding in future cases. How this came about and what it means for the future of effective competition enforcement globally are the twin concerns of this book.

Consumers can make choices because of the differentiation that is preserved by intellectual property. Competition law informs intellectual property, generally with the intent of ensuring that it achieves this main purpose. However, very often, certain public policies relating to competition interfere with the way intellectual property should normally operate, either with the purpose of reinforcing its differentiating role, or with the objective of submitting it to other public goals – such as access to essential goods and services, or in recognition of situations where a given invention becomes part of a technical standard or is deemed dangerous to health or the environment. This book presents eighty cases that interpret the various public policies that mould the interface of intellectual property law with competition law (or antitrust). Although most cases are from the United States - which has developed an enormously wide wealth of jurisprudence in this area - there are also cases from the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Brazil, South Korea, India, and Argentina. The author presents the cases under the following general headings: • setting the right dosage (i.e., avoiding too much or too little intellectual property); • setting the standards of differentiation; • refusing to license intellectual property; • licensing (and assigning) intellectual property; • enforcing intellectual property rights; • remedies; • intellectual property in sectors of special public interest; and • technical standards. Revealing in extraordinary depth the tensions behind the values of the free market which intellectual property serves and the variety of responses these tensions provoke, this book may be regarded as a watershed resource regarding the principles and policies that, sometimes coherently, sometimes not, preside over the very complex relationship between intellectual property and antitrust. It is sure to be greatly valued by all professionals in both fields, from practitioners to policymakers, as well as by academics.

Refusal to license intellectual property rights (IPRs) are an ongoing topic within the enforcement of Article 102 TFEU (ex Article 82 EC). Nevertheless, so far an economic founded instrument to analyse these cases is missing. To close this gap, the Innovation Effects and Appropriability Test will be developed throughout this book. Innovation research has been showing that firms rely on more appropriation mechanisms than only IPRs. The availability of these alternative instruments depends on the involved technologies, the kind of innovation, the concerned industry and so on. Consequently, it is in the centre of the Innovation Effects and Appropriability Test to analyse whether the dominant firm could rely on other appropriation instruments to protect its innovation and to recoup its investments in R&D.

Full of valuable tips, techniques, illustrative real-world examples, exhibits, and best practices, this handy and concise paperback will help you stay up to date on the newest thinking, strategies, developments, and technologies in licensing intellectual property. Order your copy today!

Under the auspices of the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law (now the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition). And Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica, a group of twenty scholars from around the world gathered to study the experiences made with regards to compulsory licensing. The results are demonstrated in this book. Different articles analyze how the international conventions on intellectual property may be interpreted and explore the related doctrinal groundwork surrounding compulsory patent licensing and beyond. It is shown how the compulsory licensing regime could be transformed into a truly workable mechanism facilitating the speedy use and dissemination of innovation and other subject matters of protection.

The main objective of the contributions to this book is to bring together two seemingly different strands of thought: the competition-law analysis of the exercise of intellectual property, and the discussion about the proper limits of protection, which at present takes place inside the intellectual property community. Both are burdened with their own problems, particularly so in Europe, where market integration and the divide between exclusionary and exploitative abuses ask for a more dimensional approach, and where the shaping of intellectual property protection is under not only the influence of many interests and policies, but a multi-level exercise of the Community and its member states. The question is whether, nevertheless, there is a common concern, or whether the frequently asserted convergence of the operation and of the goals of competition law and intellectual property law does not mask a fundamental difference - namely that of, on the one hand, protecting freedom of competition against welfare-reducing restrictions of competition only, and, on the other, limiting the protection of exclusive rights in the (public) interest of maintaining free access to general knowledge. The purpose of the workshop held in 2007 at the College of Europe, Bruges, and whose results are published here, was to ask which role market power plays in either context, which role it may legitimately play, and which role it ought not to play. A tentative answer might be found in the general principle that, just as intellectual property does not enjoy a particular status under competition law, so competition law may not come as a white knight to rescue intellectual property protection from itself. However, the meaning of that principle differs according to both the context of the acquisition and the exploitation of intellectual property, and it differs from one area of intellectual property to the other. Therefore, an attempt has also been made to cover more facets of the prism-like complex of problems than is generally done.

In modern markets innovation is at least as great a concern as price competition. The book discusses how antitrust policy and patent and copyright laws interact to create market dynamics that affect both competition and innovation. Antitrust and intellectual property policies for the most part are complementary, sharing common goals of promoting innovation and economic welfare. In some cases, however, their distinct approaches, one based on competition and the other on exclusion, come into conflict. As antitrust authorities focus increasingly on ensuring that firms do not interfere with innovation by rivals or impede the pace of technological progress in an industry, they necessarily must confront difficult questions about the strength and scope of intellectual property rights. When should private property rights give way to public competition objectives? When is it appropriate to remedy anticompetitive outcomes through access to protected intellectual property? How does antitrust enforcement or competition itself affect incentives to innovate? Leading economists and lawyers address these questions from both US and EU perspectives in discussing salient antitrust cases involving intellectual property rights such as Microsoft, Magill, Kodak, IMS and Intel.