The Research On The Antitrust Regulation Of Patent Tying

In recent years, with the abuse of intellectual property eliminating and restricting competition being paid more attention by anti-monopoly institution, it is common that the patentee who takes a dominant market position carry on patent tying. It is proved that multinational corporations took advantage of patent tying to restrict competition in a series of cases, such as “Qualcomm monopoly cases” and “Huawei v. IDC cases”. Patent tying,which not only affects the healthy operation of the market, but also blocks the technological innovation and progress, should be regulated within the antitrust law. However, the antitrust regulations concerning patent tying is not perfect, in recent time, resulting in coming across many problems with regulating patent tying. Therefore, the thesis focuses on solving these problems to make up for the deficiency of the antitrust regulating.Besides the abstract and conclusion, this thesis mainly consists of three parts as follows:Part I: The theoretical basis of the antitrust law regulating patent tying. As the foundation of the paper, firstly, it gives a brief introduction about the general information of the patent tying, defining the patent tying based on the analysis of the typical viewpoints and characteristic of the behavior and analyzing its elements; Then, the paper explain the cause why the antitrust law regulates patent tying, and demonstrate the rationality from the necessary and feasibility views.Part II: The main problems of the antitrust law regulating patent tying. First, it is difficult to recognize the illegality of patent tying, which mainly focuses on the recognition of the dominant market position, the independence of the product, the harm of the behavior; Second, because of the lack of regulation both in antitrust law and related judicial interpretation, patentee fails to defense with reasonable grounds; Finally, the antitrust law liability of patent tying is so simple that it has only stipulates general civil and administrate liability, absence of the criminal liability making it difficult to apply.Part III: Suggestions about solving of the problems above. First, keep the illegality recognition under the principle of reasonableness, considering the particularity of the patent, it should be improved by which recognize the dominant market position, the independence of the product, the harm of the behavior, while breaking through the traditional methods. Second, the paper suggests that economic efficiency, product quality, allocation of risks be classified as the exemption of the patent tying, and explain the scope of application; Finally, the antitrust law liability should be improved by making up for deficiency of the civil and administrate liability and the criminal liability should be introduced in the antitrust system so as to regulate patent tying better.