Antitrust/IP Advisory: Federal Antitrust Agencies Announce Hearings on the Intersection of Antitrust and Intellectual Property Issues
11/1/2001
This advisory discusses the series of hearings that the FTC and DOJ will be holding on "Competition and Intellectual Property Law and Policy in the Knowledge Based Economy" in January 2002. The advisory describes the purpose and substance of the hearings, as well as the two Federal Circuit cases that the FTC refers to in its Notice (Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo of America, Inc., 897 F.2d 1572 (Fed. Cir. 1990) and In Re Independent Service Organizations Antitrust Litigation, 203 F.3d 1322 (Fed. Cir. 2001)). These two cases highlight the two key tension points between IP and antitrust - when the patent holder goes too far from an antitrust perspective; and the antitrust limits on a patent holder's freedom to decide whether to license and on what terms.
