Title
Standard Setting, Intellectual Property Rights and Antitrust
Author
Massimiliano Granieri, Adjunct Professor of Comparative Private Law and Economic Analysis of Law at the University of Foggia Law School
Date
4/11/2008
(Original Publish Date: 6/1/2004)
(Original Publish Date: 6/1/2004)
Abstract
Among the various perceptions of a problem - the interface between intellectual property and competition - which continues to attract academics as well as law and economics practitioners to the point of forming a last frontier in intellectual property and antitrust law, there is one which covers intellectual property protection for those technologies subject to standardisation processes. It concerns an aspect which, on close examination, is upheld by an apparent contradiction, since owner conditions associated with the intellectual property issue come up against the rather “open” characteristic of the standards, as technology sharing represents a condition for market access. It is this specific characteristic of standards, as requisites for running an industrial business, which warns from the outset of the significant contact and contrast profiles that can occur with norms set up to protect competition within the market, inasmuch as property rights on a given technology do not simply mean the possibility of launching an invention and marketing it - which are the options normally recognised for the intellectual property rights holder - but control over the possibilities of competition in the technology market and in the downstream market of those products which incorporate that technology.
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