Antitrust vs. patents [LWN.net]

Antitrust vs. patents

Posted Mar 3, 2009 2:34 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165)
In reply to: Third time is the charm? by JoeBuck
Parent article: Third time is the charm?

As I understand it, patents trump antitrust. The whole point of patents is to establish or maintain a monopoly. But I'm no lawyer.

I would welcome education on the topic.

Antitrust vs. patents

Posted Mar 3, 2009 9:39 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

Antitrust is basically « you're so big you've escaped normal market forces so either you play nice and self-regulate or we'll have to regulate you ourselves to keep competition (and market) alive ». It can trump pretty much everything else when there's an actual political will behind.

Antitrust vs. patents

Posted Mar 6, 2009 18:50 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

We're looking at two different monopolies here: the monopoly over selling of VFAT, which is what the patent creates, and the monopoly over selling computers with removable storage, which results if VFAT has somehow become the only practical way to do removable storage.

In cases where companies have lost antitrust lawsuits because they used a patent to control interoperability like this, the redress was not that the invention became public domain, but that the patent holder was forced to license the patent for royalties the court determined were fair -- basically, what the patent holder would be able to get if he hadn't been able to corner the market.

Antitrust vs. patents

Posted Mar 17, 2009 4:05 UTC (Tue) by yuhong (guest, #57183) [Link]

And as it turns out, MS is already making these FAT patents available for licensing, though I doubt it is compatible with open source software.