Competition Law – Intellectual Property Interface: A Comparative Analysis between United States and India

Competition agencies' guidelines, policy statements, as well as associated advocacy efforts are important vehicles for expressing policy across the full range of anti-competitive practices, and for companies' aid in determining their market behaviour. They also provide an empirical foundation for documenting the trends and evolution of policy thought across jurisdictions and time by providing a window into the brains of administration officials and specialists on the issues they're dealing with. Protection of Intellectual Property Rights within the competition law involves various complexities due to their technical nature. As such, the relevant law is in constant need of upgradation especially in the field of patents. With this perspective, this paper provides a comparative analysis between the jurisdictions of the United States (also called the “cradle of anti-trust laws”) and India (a developing country with fairly less experience with competition laws) examining the competition laws, guidelines and policy initiatives in the context of Intellectual Property in order to track the trends and developments affecting the competition law – IP interface. The measures used for comparison in the paper are: licensing practices, patent settlements, competition advocacy in respect of Intellectual Property. The main focus is on competition agency rules, policy statements, and advocacy actions relating to IP, implementation and case developments are mentioned when they are useful in showing relevant methods and trends. The data reveals that unlike three decades ago, focus on the effective application of competition law to IP is not limited to some limited traditional industrialized jurisdictions. It is found that there are notable cross-jurisdictional learnings and implementations in policies and guidelines.