Intellectual property & Antitrust: An overview of EU and national case law

The interaction between competition rules and intellectual property (“IP”) rights continues to be the source of lively debates in Brussels and other capitals across the globe. IP lawyers lament that competition lawyers do not understand IP rules and that competition intervention undermines the core objectives of IP laws. IP lawyers (and some competition lawyers) argue that if there are any issues with IP rights or the way they are exercised, the IP system can be tweaked to address them. Indeed, IP rights are designed to strike a balance between the need to encourage innovation (by granting exclusivity) and the need to spread ideas (for example, a patent is granted in exchange for the disclosure of an invention that may otherwise be kept secret). Competition enforcers stress that they do