Re-visiting Unsuccessful Competition Law Challenges to Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights in Asia

While the teaching of international intellectual property law has traditionally emphasized the important role that competition policies play in addressing instances of abuse of patent rights by rights holders, building a successful competition claim can often be a difficult task. This paper argues that the emphasis on examining successful cases of competition policy-based claims to address abuse of pharmaceutical patent rights needs to be complemented by an examination of unsuccessful cases so that stakeholders can be better aware of how to construct a strong argument that may convince competition and/or judicial authorities. This paper updates my earlier work on cases where competition policies were unsuccessfully applied in Asia, a region which has had, in general, less experience with competition cases involving intellectual property and the pharmaceutical sector compared with Western countries.