An “invention,” as used in the United States patent laws, refers to anything made by man that employs or harnesses a law of nature or a naturally occurring substance for human benefit. A watermill, for instance, harnesses the power of gravity to run machinery. But legal methods, such as tax...

The IEEE-SA updated patent policy and the Business Review Letter issued by the US DoJ have caused much discussion in the US (Sidak, 2015). The purpose of this paper is to assess whether a similarly lenient antitrust approach to Standard Setting Organizations’ (“SSOs”) rate setting policies...

In European legal scholarship, many articles discuss the equilibrium reached in the case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) when the EU antitrust prohibitions apply to, and restrain, the free and ordinary use of intellectual property rights (“IPRs”). We call this...

This paper examines the evolution of national competition (antitrust) policies and enforcement approaches vis-à-vis intellectual property rights (IPRs) and associated anti-competitive practices in major jurisdictions over the past several decades. It focuses especially on the underlying process...

Competition agency guidelines, policy statements and related advocacy are an important vehicle for policy expression and the guidance of firms across the full spectrum of anti-competitive practices and market conduct. The role of guidelines and policy statements has, arguably, been particularly...

The harmonization of criminal law and procedure is still in its infancy within European Union law and so the relationship between the commercial framework of intellectual property and the criminal enforcement of its standards remains an unsettled and unsettling adolescence. The Proposal for a...

In today's knowledge-driven economy, patents play a vital role. Not only large industrial companies use patents to protect their ideas but also small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and, increasingly, universities and other research institutes file patent applications to safeguard and exploit the...

This paper rejects the fundamental "private law" premise of patent law remedies that courts should always attempt to restore the status quo ante by making the patentee "whole" in the event of infringement. Instead, the patent system and its associated remedies should be viewed as part of a...

Technology acquirers face significant information asymmetry when identifying appropriate acquisition targets. Employing plausibly exogenous variation in technological information gathering costs caused by staggered openings of patent libraries, we find that firms become more active in...