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Patent Acquisition, Patent Wars and Technology Transfer: A Growing Area of Interest for Competition Policy

Company strategies in the area of intellectual property rights have long been almost exclusively the province of IP Law. This is rapidly changing. Competition authorities are having a closer look at how companies acquire IPRs, and how they enforce the IP rights that they hold. The European Commission is embarking on a broad consulting exercise as a prelude to the possible revision of its Technology Transfer Guidelines. These developments are likely to significantly alter the regulatory environment to which companies must tailor their IP strategies.

As an input in this forthcoming review, DG Competition commissioned an "Assessment of Potential Anticompetitive Conduct in the Field of Intellectual Property Rights and Assessment of Interplay between Competition Policy and Intellectual Property Rights Protection", which is now available from the EC's website.

Authors of the report are Pierre Régibeau (CRA and Imperial College) and Katharine Rockett (University of Essex and CEPR). Pierre Régibeau, formerly an Academic Associate of CRA, is now a Vice President in our European practice. He has previously held academic positions at MIT, Northwestern University, the Institute for Economic Analysis in Barcelona and the University of Essex. He has been studying intellectual property rights and other technology-related issues such as technology standards for more than twenty years. He further strengthens our ability to advise clients on IP-related competition issues, a fast-growing area of antitrust enforcement and merger control.

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