USA / INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY/ INTEROPERABILITY

In an article in AIPLA’s Quarterly Journal, Volume 28 No 3, Summer 2000, entitled The IPR Paradox: Leveraging Intellectual Property Rights to encourage Interoperability in the Networking Computer Age, the author (Michael J. Schallop) goes to the heart of the problem of setting what is often called the monopoly conferred by intellectual property rights against the anti-trust objections to market dominance. The background is the need for interoperability in computer technology and the possibility, among many others, that it should be promoted by way of compulsory licensing. The author discusses this at length, with particular reference to the issues arising in the Intergraph v Intel case. In that case, the District Court had relied on the "essential facilities" doctrine; but the author takes the view that the doctrine is inappropriate in intellectual property right matters and in the context of de facto standards for network computing markets. The author "does not intend to overstate the advantages of IPR towards interoperability" but has confidence in "current trends, such as de jure standardization, open source and community source licensing and patent pooling, which represent different types of IPR contractual safe harbor mechanisms that can be leveraged to encourage interoperability in certain NC markets". [20022]