| In traditional industries, technical standards are to ensure the interchangeability among products and safeguard social common interests. The separation of technical standards and technical patents provides great convenience and accelerate technical innovation. With the development of knowledge economy, however, economic returns depend more on technical innovations and intellectual property, bringing technical standards and patents together as a consequence. The union of technical standards and patents make public technical standards conflict with private patents, which necessarily leads to monopoly of technical standards in intellectual property. Many lawsuits in China have already highlighted the impact on national industries of the monopolistic technical standards, economic development suffers, too. The increasing number of patents applied by foreign firms also signals the control over the technical standards afterwards. It has therefore become an urgent issue how to balance the relations between technical standards and patents, and how to avoid technical standards becoming a means for private profit. This paper focuses the above issue and holds that antitrust law is necessary to balance the conflict between the public nature of technical standards and the private nature of patents.Then paper begins with the causes behind limitation on competition by technical standards. Technical standards have nothing to do with patents in traditional industries, but knowledge economy brings them together naturally, and nearly all of advanced technologies have applied patents in information industry. Hence technical standards could not bypass patents, if they want to reflect the latest technology. On the other hand, the incorporation of patents into technical standards will bring huge economic interests to patentees. Union of technical standards with patents, however, not only stimulates economic development but also limits competition, because technical standards reflect more the public nature,... |
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