Suchergebnisse

This special symposium issue of The Antitrust Bulletin addresses two related issues of competition policy in the digital age. The first is whether patent holders can distort voluntary standard-setting processes in ways that allow them to obtain and exercise market power. Such conduct would lead to higher intellectual property royalties for technologies that are used in standards-based products and higher prices for those products. By changing the returns to innovative activity, for both licensees and patentees, this conduct may also distort the timepaths of technological change. The second issue is what, if anything, should be done to prevent this type of anticompetitive behavior from occurring and what to do when it arises. The articles in this symposium address these issues from a variety of perspectives.

In this article, we analyze the remedies that should be imposed when an intellectual property owner fails to disclose its holdings to other participants in a standard-setting organization (SSO). We show how nondisclosure can lead to supracompetitive royalty rates, different standards from those under full disclosure, or both. We then explain why royalties must be set below those that would have prevailed under full disclosure to account for the fact that punishment is not certain and remedies are often imposed only prospectively. We also explain why even lower royalty rates may be needed when standardized technologies can be improved over time. We apply our analysis to the remedies sought by the Federal Trade Commission and the commitments obtained by the European Commission in response to allegations that Rambus Inc., a developer and licensor of DRAMs, had failed to disclose its intellectual property holdings to JEDEC, an SSO.