Steffano Grassani wrote a thoughtful response to my post on the Italian Pfizer decision. His discussion helps to crystallize some of the key issues raised by the case that merit some further consideration. Clearly, Steffano is right that misleading patent authorities is not the only possible patent related abuse. However, it must also be true…
The past decade has seen a flurry of articles published trying to make sense of the degree of control that the EU Courts exercise on complex economic reasoning. By contrast, much less has been written about the Courts’ unlimited jurisdiction on fines, which allows them to increase or decrease the financial sanctions imposed by the…
In its recent TeliaSonera judgment, the Court of Justice discusses whether a margin squeeze can only be abusive if the dominant company has a duty to supply the input at issue. The Court concludes that a duty to supply is not needed. The judgment, however, does not offer a clear definition of the scope for…
Lawyers do funny things to words. Sometimes, of course, they need to create a technical term to cover something that doesn’t exist in ordinary parlance. “Tort” is an obvious example. Yes, you can talk about a civil wrong that has no element of contract to it but that’s a longwinded way of expressing yourself. Most…
On Friday 2nd July, Monty Widenius, founder of open source database company MySQL, owned by Sun, filed an appeal against the European Commission’s unconditional clearance of the merger between Oracle and Sun Microsystems. The main affected area in this case was the database market. This market is highly concentrated with the three main proprietary database…
