Competition law and intellectual property

About this book

"It has become a truism in today's world that intellectual property rights (IPRs) have taken the place of access to commodities in the traditional economy. Device producers have increasingly adopted a software-centric approach, whilst high-tech companies' revenues depend ultimately on their ability to innovate. It thus happens that companies, in addition to competing through new product development, frequently use IPR-based litigation to delay competitors' access to the market. In such conditions, antitrust law is the obvious tool to address competition concerns. This book focuses on the convergent roles of competition law and regulation of IPRs in the context of the European Single Market. The perspectives of the expert authors - judges, academics, and lawyers who gathered in Rome in 2009 for the Annual Conference of the Association of European Competition Law Judges - disentangle and efficiently recombine the diverse threads woven into this complex pattern; the rapidly evolving technical environment, the decentralization process inherent in the 'Community acquis', and the lack of a single effective European jurisdiction for IPRs. Particular attention is paid to the latter, with its additional and unnecessary costs of enforcement through duplicate efforts, and divergent outcomes in multiple litigations in national jurisdictions, making litigation strategies an exercise in forum shopping and inducing delay strategies"--P. [4] of cover.