Assessment of Potential Anticompetitive Conduct in the Field of Intellectual Property Rights and Assessment of the Interplay Between Competition Policy and IPR Protection

This is a report on aspects of the interface between competition law and patent law. Competition authorities have long been aware of the potentially difficult relationship between these two bodies of Law. At the level of the EU, this relationship has already been abundantly discussed in both the Technology Transfer Guidelines and the Horizontal Guidelines. Indeed, these thoughtful documents already deal with a number ofbissues in a manner that is largely consistent with both current legal doctrine and the currentstate of economic analysis. The report is therefore highly selective, concentrating on issuesbwhere we feel that recent economic analysis has something to add to the debate.