Posts Tagged: "Carlos Aboim"

IP Holds Lessons for Antitrust Law; No Monopoly on Patent Appeals the Way to Go

In November, the UIC John Marshall Law School held their 63rd Annual Intellectual Property Conference in Chicago, IL. The program consisted of four plenary sessions and nine breakout sessions covering artificial intelligence, patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, antitrust, and in-house counsel, as well as IT and privacy developments. Speakers came from China, Europe, and the Middle East, and represented government, industry, academia, nonprofits, and practice. IPWatchdog’s Editor-In-Chief, Eileen McDermott was there. The program kicked off with a keynote address the Honorable Chief Judge Diane Wood of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Titled “Antitrust & IP: Does It Need to Be Retooled?”, Chief Judge Wood spoke about the need for procedural and substantive reform. She began by observing that “[t]he general rule has been for many years — and I think this is entirely correct — that intellectual property is property.” She noted that this approach has been encapsulated in the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission’s Guidelines for the Licensing of Intellectual Property, and that “the fundamentals of antitrust analysis are the same, although the answers may be a little different.” Citing standard essential patents as an example, she said that “there may be some real synergies back and forth between the IP field and the antitrust field that would be well worth exploring,” in particular when considering how antitrust law should approach access issues involving digital platforms, as what is sought is “FRAND-type access to these platforms. ”

Renee C. Quinn

November 27, 2019

The Future is in Our Hands; No Room in the U.S. for Second Best

A reliable and predictable patent law is more necessary than ever, for technology is a much larger part of our industrial product than ever. The recent Supreme Court attention to patent cases reflects their importance to the nation. The balances are not simple, the fresh balances among creativity, business risk, competition, trade, the creation of new knowledge, the production of industrial capital, and fairness, justice. There is no room in the United States for second best. You and we, lawyers and judges, share this responsibility.

Renee C. Quinn

December 6, 2018

Standard Essential Patents, Antitrust and Market Power

Antitrust agency communications, such as the EU Commission’s Horizontal Guidelines and the FTC/DOJ Licensing Guidelines underline that market power does not necessarily result from patent ownership as such. They contain, however, no specific language on standard-essential patents which are – if they are valid and truly standard-essential – different from other patents in that they must, by definition, be used in order to operate on the respective standard-based market. In Europe at least, it seems to be increasingly accepted that SEPs can convey market power but that they do not necessarily always do so. Advocate General Wathelet’s proposition (para. 57 et seq. of his opinion in the Huawei/ZTE case) to establish a rebuttable presumption that SEP ownership generates market power has not been taken up by the CJEU’s Huawei/ZTE-decision, probably because the parties already agreed that Huawei held a dominant position (para. 43). But court decisions from the UK (for instance Unwired Planet/Huawei, a summary of the case is provided here) and Germany (for instance LG Düsseldorf, 26.3.2015, 4b O 140/13) have taken a case-sensitive approach, looking not only at the leverage generated by a SEP but also at circumstances which may limit its holder’s power.

Peter Georg Picht

December 6, 2017