News
06 March 2018
Webinar by Martin Watzinger, University of Munich
TIME-MBE and the TECHNIS research group invite you to a free webinar.
Please join us for a webinar on Tuesday the 13th of March 2018 at 11:00 GMT. The speaker is Martin Watzinger, University of Munich.
The title of the talk is “How Antitrust Enforcement Can Spur Innovation: Bell Labs and the 1956 Consent Decree”.
The moderator will be Dr. Andreas Panagopoulos.
The program we use to deliver webinars is called VSee and you can easily download it for free. A very short demo of VSee can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDb7-Mrz0L4.
This webinar is free and open to all.
To participate and for further information, please contact Dr. Andreas Panagopoulos at least a day prior to the seminar.
Abstract: Is compulsory licensing an effective antitrust remedy to increase innovation? To answer this question, we analyze the 1956 consent decree which settled an antitrust lawsuit against Bell, a vertically integrated monopolist charged with foreclosing the telecommunications equipment market. Bell was forced to license all its existing patents royalty-free, including those not related to telecommunications. We show that this led to a long-lasting increase in innovation but only in markets outside the telecommunications industry. Within telecommunications, where Bell continued to exclude competitors, we find no effect. Compulsory licensing is an effective antitrust remedy only if incumbents cannot foreclose the product markets.
