IP under threat from competition clampdown
01 April 2009
Managing Intellectual Property
From pharmaceuticals to telecoms, software and even copyright licensing, antitrust authorities are clamping down on abuses of IP rights. James Nurton, Eileen McDermott and Peter Ollier examine why IP is under scrutiny and discuss some pending cases and investigations
Microsoft, Rambus, Qualcomm, AstraZeneca – a distinguished list of innovative companies or a rogues' gallery of competition cheats? The line dividing the two descriptions is becoming increasingly hard to define as more and more IP-intensive companies face antitrust investigations. The prospect of dawn raids, line-by-line scrutiny of contracts and emails and ultimately time-consuming litigation against competition authorities is now real for all IP-owning companies.
What's particularly alarming is that this is a global phenomenon, and investigations are not just in isolated companies but concern industry-wide practices. Pharmaceutical companies are being challenged over reverse payments (where originator companies pay generics to delay manufacturing drugs) and litigation tactics. In high-tech fields such as IT and telecoms, authorities are concerned about companies not fully disclosing patents to standard-setting bodies. Even the beleaguered music industry, losing revenues to online piracy, is not immune: last year the European Commission attacked anti-competitive clauses in music collecting...
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