A PYMNTS Company

Patent Settlements and Reverse Payments Under EU Law

By  |  January 8, 2010

Marc van der Waude, Marc van der Waude, Nov 01, 2009

The purpose of this contribution is to explore the status types that settlements and reverse payments could have under Article 81 EC. It seeks to identify the elements of the legal tests which could possibly be applied to assess the legality of such settlements and, in particular, those providing for a value transfer from the originator to the generic firm. This will be done as follows: Section 2 summarizes the main findings of the Final Report on settlement agreements; Section 3 makes an inventory of relatively old case law that dealt with comparable issues or those related to patent settlement agreements; and Section 4 makes an attempt to distill a legal test from the two previous sections for the assessment of patent settlement agreements between originator and generic firms under EC competition law.

Links to Full Content