Standard Essential Patents: The Intersection between Intellectual Property Law and Competition Law

With the spread of standard technologies in all fields, especially communications technology, standard essential patents have gained much importance. For the sake of assurance as to access to such patent, standard organizations have required the owners to undertake to grant license on this basis is to prevent owners of standard essential patents from abusing their exclusive power in the market and committing anti-competitive acts. Meanwhile, they are entitled to earn appropriate remuneration for their essential patents.
There are controversies as to conditions of the said obligations. There have been a number of cases which present a common practice with regard to preventing abuse of excusive power and anti-competitive acts.
The results of this analytic-descriptive study show the importance of a balance between the interests of standard essential patents owners and those enforcing standards and in order to preserve competition, the conditions of granting licenses must be determined clearly. In the absence of specific provisions, in the Iranian law, in order to regulate standard essential patents, recourse may be made to the rules on compulsory licenses and prevention of abuse of dominant position in the act on the implementation of article 44 of the constitution. Meanwhile, specific provisions for standard essential patents would clarify the legal status of such patents and reduce disputes.