Intellectual Property Rights: The View from Competition Policy

Three propositions inform the debate over the relationship between intellectual property rights and competition policy. The first involves concerns over how the anticompetitive uses of intellectual property will increase as intellectual property rights become stronger. The second is that the uses of competition norms to loosen intellectual property rights will diminish the incentives for innovation. Finally, there is the belief that the tension between competition policy and intellectual property rights can be reconciled by recognizing how market competition is consistent with innovation and by acknowledging the competition norms that shape the scope of intellectual property rights. In this Essay, I examine these three propositions and their application to the preliminary report on the pharmaceutical industry released by the European Commission on November 28, 2008.