The Definition Of The Relevant Product Market Involving The Standard Essential Patent

In 2008, China developed the” Outline of the National Intellectual Property Strategy”, which put forwarded the prevention of the abusing the intellectual property. Then the “Rules about Prohibiting Excluding and Restricting Competition through Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights” was published. Now, the “Guideline on the Anti-monopoly Law involving intellectual property field” is on the public comment period. The above process reflects that the antitrust regulation and restriction involving intellectual property has arouse the attention in our country. Recently, the HUAWEI filed suit with. IDC, and Qualcomm being launched an antitrust investigation by the national development and reform commission. These practices embody the “lock-in” effect of the essential patent and the importance of the study on the antitrust regulation and restriction involving the standard essential patents(short for “SEP”). The precondition on determining whether the standard essential patent holders abuse his market dominant position is to define the relevant market of the SEP. As a result, this paper is aimed to explore the general and special rules of defining the relevant market on the SEP through the definition of the innovation market(focused on the “research and develop” of the SEP”), technology market(focused on the patent technology) and good market(focused on the patent product, including the intermediate and final product) based on the Europe and the United States’ legislation and judicial practice.The first chapter in this paper describes the monopoly characteristics of the essential patent under the technical standard, the exact meaning of the separate product and the relevant market of the separate product in the antitrust regulation and restriction involving SEP.The second and third chapter is the crux of this chapter, which mainly embraces the definition of three types of relevant market(innovation, technology and product market).The second chapter focuses on the definition of product market and technology market. This paper not only analyzes the general rules but the special rules on the definition of the product market based on the juridical practice of Europe and United States. The specialty which is embodied in the definition of the market of final product is influenced by the definition of upstream technology market or both the upstream technology and the intermediate product market. As refer to the technology market, this paper emphasizes the exclusiveness of the technology market, which means that each SEP constitutes an independent technology market or the aggregate independent technology markets. However, this paper also put forward the objection against this specialty.The third chapter mainly analyses the innovation market which our country has not accepted. This paper not only sorts out the legislation of United States on the innovation market theory, but also analyzes the general and special rules of definition of innovation marketThe forth chapter is the analysis and conclusion of the definition of the relevant market in our country.There for, this paper is aimed to provide the relative clean idea and solution of definition of the relevant market in the antitrust regulation and restriction case involving the SEP.