U.S. Antitrust Enforcement Agency Proposes Changes to Patent Law

By Constance K. Robinson, James L. Ewing and Peter M. Boyle

On 28 October 2003, the Federal Trade Commission ("FTC") - one of the two federal agencies responsible for enforcing U.S. antitrust laws - released a much-awaited report containing certain conclusions and recommendations based on its intellectual property/antitrust hearings.

The FTC held these hearings jointly with the other federal antitrust agency, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division ("DOJ"), between February and November 2002. The hearings explored how antitrust and intellectual property laws do and should co-exist in a knowledge-based economy, how they share the same goal of promoting innovation, and how each regime relates to the other.