ANTITRUST TREATMENT OF OLIGOPOLIES WITH MUTUALLY BLOCKING PATENT PORTFOLIOS

Classically, intellectual property rights have been viewed as ways to create monopolies over single products or groups of products in order to encourage the research and investment needed to bring those products to market.1 This objective is in formal contradiction to the objectives of antitrust law to maintain prices at competitive levels, and the balance between intellectual property rights (IPR) and antitrust law has always been uneasy. For many years, the balance strongly favored antitrust law, but a swing toward favoring intellectual property law took place in the last part of the 20th century, with the focus on giving a licensor greater freedom to use various IPR licensing devices in its distribution arrangements to increase its monopoly rent.2