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How should patents be taken into consideration in merger analysis? When does the combining of patent portfolios lead to anticompetitive concerns? Two principles should guide these inquiries. First, as the Supreme Court held in its 2006 decision Independent Ink, ownership of a patent does not confer market power. This ruling came in the context of a tying claim, but it is generalizable. While ownership of a patent can provide advantages in the market, such as access to techniques that are more effective than what is available to a competitor or the ability to keep competitors from making desirable differentiations in existing products, ownership of a patent or patent portfolio does not per se confer market power. Competitors might have equally strong and broad patent portfolios. The power to limit price competition is possibly counterweighted by competition over technology and product quality.

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Ever since David Teece and coauthors began writing about antitrust and innovation in high-tech industries in the 1980s, we’ve understood that traditional, price-based antitrust analysis is not intrinsically well-suited for assessing merger policy in these markets.

For high-tech industries, performance, not price, is paramount — which means that innovation is key…

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This symposium offers a good opportunity to look again into the complex relation between concentration and innovation in antitrust policy. Whilst the details of the EC decision in Dow/Dupont remain unknown, the press release suggests that the issue of “incentives to innovate” was central to the review. Contrary to what had leaked in the antitrust press, the decision has apparently backed off from the introduction of a new “model”, and instead followed a more cautious approach. After a quick reminder of the conventional “appropriability v cannibalization” framework that drives merger analysis in innovation markets (1), I make two sets of hopefully innovative remarks on appropriability and IP rights (2) and on cannibalization in the ag-biotech sector (3).

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The US agriculture sector has been experiencing consolidation at all levels for decades, even as the global ag economy has been growing and becoming more diverse. Much of this consolidation has been driven by technological changes that created economies of scale, both at the farm level and beyond.

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Modern agriculture companies like Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta, develop cutting-edge seeds containing genetic traits that make them resistant to insecticides and herbicides. They also  develop crop protection chemicals to use throughout the life of the crop to further safeguard from pests, weeds and grasses, and disease. No single company has a monopoly on all the high-demand seeds and traits or crop protection products. Thus, in order for Company A to produce a variety of corn that is resistant to Company B’s herbicide, it may have to license a trait patented by Company B in order to even begin researching its product, and it may need further licenses (and other inputs) from Company B as its research progresses in unpredictable directions.

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Earlier this week the European Commission cleared the merger of Dow and DuPont, subject to conditions including divestiture of DuPont’s “global R&D organisation.” As the Commission noted:

The Commission had concerns that the merger as notified would have reduced competition on price and choice in a number of markets for existing pesticides. Furthermore, the merger would have reduced innovation. Innovation, both to improve existing products and to develop new active ingredients, is a key element of competition between companies in the pest control industry, where only five players are globally active throughout the entire research & development (R&D) process.

In addition to the traditional focus on price effects, the merger’s presumed effect on innovation loomed large in the EC’s consideration of the Dow/DuPont merger — as it is sure to in its consideration of the other two pending mergers in the agricultural biotech and chemicals industries between Bayer and Monsanto and ChemChina and Syngenta. Innovation effects are sure to take center stage in the US reviews of the mergers, as well.

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Summary

A novel theory of harm is crystalising in European Union (“EU”) merger control. Under this theory, the EU Commission (“Commission”) can intervene in mergers that it considers generally reduce innovation incentives in an industry as a whole. This theory of harm can be referred to as the Significant Impediment to Industry Innovation (“SIII”) theory. This policy paper first attempts to describe the content and extent of the SIII theory (I). Second, it shows that the SIII theory marks a departure from established EU merger control practice (II). Third, it discusses the economic foundations of the SIII theory (III). Finally, it puts forward best practices for the assessment of mergers in R&D intensive industries (IV). With this, the present paper hopes to assist in the development of sound merger control policy in innovative markets, and undermine crude conjectures on the relationship between market structure, patent statistics and industry innovation theory.

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The lifecycle of a law is a curious one; born to fanfare, a great solution to a great problem, but ultimately doomed to age badly as lawyers seek to shoehorn wholly inappropriate technologies and circumstances into its ambit. The latest chapter in the book of badly aging laws comes to us courtesy of yet another dysfunctional feature of our political system: the Supreme Court nomination and confirmation process.

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Summary

“The court of appeals’ decision poses a grave risk to the innovation economy. The court condemned as per se violations of the antitrust laws practices that made competition possible in a nascent market through introduction of a new business model. And it did so in the absence of any precedent holding that the novel combination of practices at issue could be deemed per se illegal. The court of appeals’ decision thus sends a chill wind through industry sectors where entrepreneurs are contemplating the launch of innovative business models to fuel the modern economy.

This Court’s precedent on application of the per se rule is clear: “[I]t is only after considerable experience with certain business relationships that courts classify them as per se violations” of the antitrust laws. Broad. Music, Inc. v. Columbia Broad. Sys., Inc., 441 U.S. 1, 9 (1979) (“BMI”). Per se condemnation is appropriate only when a practice lacks any plausible procompetitive rationale. Cal. Dental Ass’n v. FTC, 526 U.S. 756, 771 (1999). If there is no long track record of judicial experience establishing that a practice always or almost always lessens competition, then the practice should be subject to analysis under the rule of reason. BMI, 441 U.S. at 23-24. In that way, a finding that a novel practice (or an old practice in a new context) is anticompetitive may be made only after a rigorous analysis of all the facts and circumstances. Such a rule sensibly avoids unintentional condemnation of economically valuable activity where the full effects of that activity are simply unknown to the courts.

In disregard of these principles, the court of appeals applied the per se rule to a novel combination of competition-enabling practices in an emerging market. The negative consequences of the court’s ruling will be particularly acute for modern high technology sectors of the economy, where entrepreneurs planning to create entirely new markets or inject competition into existing ones through adoption of new business models will now face exactly the sort of artificial deterrents that this Court has strived to prevent. “Mistaken inferences and the resulting false condemnations ‘are especially costly, because they chill the very conduct the antitrust laws are designed to protect…’”