Competition Law and Intellectual Property Rights: Whether Conflicting or Complementing Each Other to Serve a Common Purpose?

Abstract

This article is based on the hypothesis that there exists far less conflict between competition/antitrust policy and intellectual property rights (IPRs) than there is made out to be. Historically, judges have imagined far greater conflicts between antitrust policy and intellectual property rights than have actually existed, or else relied on generalizations rather than close analysis. For example, they have often assumed that the presence of an intellectual property right has led to anticompetitive effects where there was no basis for finding any injury to competition at all. The fact that true conflicts between antitrust and intellectual property rights are relatively rare has been highlighted. Thus, an analysis has been done in the ways in which these two important areas of government regulation are and are not in tension, and we discuss the history of the relationship between these laws and whether they are in conflict or complementing each other. Further, we submit that antitrust can serve the goals of innovation and dynamic efficiency directly in circumstances in which competition, not monopoly, serves as a spur to innovation. The goal of the IP and antitrust laws should be to seek a robust balance between competition and monopoly in the service of dynamic efficiency.