HE FEDERAL Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice have commenced a series of public hearings on the relationships between antitrust and intellectual property laws. Entitled “Competition and Intellectual Property Law and Policy in the Knowledge-Based Economy,” the hearings are designed to address basic issues of overlap between antitrust and intellectual property laws such as refusals to license intellectual property, bundling intellectual property rights in licenses, “grant-backs” of intellectual property rights, patent pools and the role of intellectual property rights in decisions by standard-setting organizations.
Thus far, the FTC/DOJ hearings have served as a forum for a number of different perspectives. Antitrust lawyers have emphasized a need to balance patent and antitrust enforcement to ensure that patent law and antitrust law achieve a common objective of promoting competition and encouraging innovation. Patent lawyers have emphasized that patents do not always grant “monopolies” in the antitrust sense because the power to exclude competitors from making, using or selling a particular invention does not always result in market power. They also stress that the granting of patents results in a beneficial trade-off for society, with the patent owner gaining exclusivity for a limited period of time in return for disclosure of its invention to the public.
