FRAND Commitments and EC Competition Law: A Rejoinder

This rejoinder is a response to the reply by Damien Geradin and Miguel Rato to the article FRAND Commitments - The Case for Antitrust Intervention.

Philippe Chappatte covers briefly what he considers to be the key weaknesses of the Geradin/Rato paper. He argues that:

• there is a real risk of excessive royalties through hold-up and royalty stacking
• contract law, ex ante licensing/declarations and litigation are not practical solutions
• the benchmarks proposed in the original article are workable

This article originally appeared in the April 2010 issue of the European Competition Journal.