New Paper - Geradin and Rato on SSOs and Exploitative Abuses

A few weeks ago, I posted on SSRN a paper on Standard Setting Organizations(SSOs) and Exploitative abuses. Recently, standard-setting activities have received much attention as a result of several high-profile cases.  There seems to be a growing perception, largely fed by certain interest groups, that current standard-setting procedures generally based on the so-called FRAND licensing regime unduly allow opportunistic holders of Intellectual Property embedded in a standard to extract excessive royalties from their licensees.  This paper demonstrates that the existing FRAND regime works and that ongoing proposals to alter it by tilting the bargaining position of licensors, in particular that of pure innovators, in favour of licensees are not only unnecessary, but also potentially detrimental to investment and innovation.  The paper also considers the applicability of Article 82 of the EC Treaty to claims of excessive-pricing in the IP and standard-setting context.  It shows that, due to numerous conceptual and practical difficulties, determination of appropriate royalty levels for valuable IP should be left to the market.