European Community Compulsory Licensing Policy: Heresy versus Commen Sense Symposium on European Competition Law

There is a growing trend to limit the rights of intellectual property owners when the public interest warrants. Until very recently, this phenomenon has been manifested only at a transnational level.1 For example, the World Trade Organization, as recently as November 2001, in its Doha Agreement ( Doha ),2 enabled certain nations of the Asian and African subcontinents to obtain compulsory licenses to manufacture and distribute domestically certain anti-retroviral drugs by declaring a state of national health emergency. Doha raises an intriguing question: if limited intrusions into valuable intellectual property rights may be justified on public health grounds, should not such intrusions into intellectual property also be tolerated, and indeed encouraged, in order to safeguard other public interests, in particular, the maintenance of competition? There is currently a stormy debate on both sides of the Atlantic as to whether compulsory licensing, on antitrust grounds, is an appropriate means of breaking monopolies that owe their existence, to a large extent, to the ownership of valuable intellectual property. In the European Union, the question is not whether the European Commission ( Commission ) and European Courts support the notion of compulsory licensing on antitrust grounds, but rather how far these institutions are willing to go to defend competition against the interests of intellectual property owners

European Community Compulsory Licensing Policy: Heresy versus Commen Sense Symposium on European Competition Law

There is a growing trend to limit the rights of intellectual property owners when the public interest warrants. Until very recently, this phenomenon has been manifested only at a transnational level.1 For example, the World Trade Organization, as recently as November 2001, in its Doha Agreement ( Doha ),2 enabled certain nations of the Asian and African subcontinents to obtain compulsory licenses to manufacture and distribute domestically certain anti-retroviral drugs by declaring a state of national health emergency. Doha raises an intriguing question: if limited intrusions into valuable intellectual property rights may be justified on public health grounds, should not such intrusions into intellectual property also be tolerated, and indeed encouraged, in order to safeguard other public interests, in particular, the maintenance of competition? There is currently a stormy debate on both sides of the Atlantic as to whether compulsory licensing, on antitrust grounds, is an appropriate means of breaking monopolies that owe their existence, to a large extent, to the ownership of valuable intellectual property. In the European Union, the question is not whether the European Commission ( Commission ) and European Courts support the notion of compulsory licensing on antitrust grounds, but rather how far these institutions are willing to go to defend competition against the interests of intellectual property owners

EC Merger Control in the 1990s: An Overview of the Draft Regulation

The wave of mergers and acquisitions experienced during the last several years in the United States is now on its way to Europe. The Commission of the European Communities (\u27Commission\u27) recently reported that cross-border mergers and stock purchases of majority shareholdings in the European Community (\u27EC\u27 or \u27Community\u27) have surged from 29 in 1983-1984 to 52 in 1985-1986. Acquisitions by non-EC companies, particularly United States and Japanese firms, are also likely to increase dramatically. The Community has become a field ripe for merger activity largely because both European and non-European companies are keen to position themselves in anticipation of \u271992,\u27 the target date for the integration of the EC Internal Market. In the absence of a strong, uniform counterweight to this pressure to merge, competition in the Community could suffer or become distorted. Merger mania may mean that stagnant national economies and high unemployment could become the legacy of 1992. In light of these developments, it is likely that the Draft Regulation, in a form approximating that of the April 1988 text, will be adopted by the Council in the coming months

The Impact of EEC Competition Law on the Music Industry

The purpose of this article is to examine the relevance of EEC competition law (or antitrust law as it is known in the United States) to the music industry. EEC antitrust cases concerning other media, such as satellite broadcasting, are discussed to the extent that they are relevant. It will be shown that EEC antitrust law has a pervasive effect on the music industry and will play an important role as the industry exploits the EEC market

EC Merger Control in the 1990s: An Overview of the Draft Regulation

The wave of mergers and acquisitions experienced during the last several years in the United States is now on its way to Europe. The Commission of the European Communities (\u27Commission\u27) recently reported that cross-border mergers and stock purchases of majority shareholdings in the European Community (\u27EC\u27 or \u27Community\u27) have surged from 29 in 1983-1984 to 52 in 1985-1986. Acquisitions by non-EC companies, particularly United States and Japanese firms, are also likely to increase dramatically. The Community has become a field ripe for merger activity largely because both European and non-European companies are keen to position themselves in anticipation of \u271992,\u27 the target date for the integration of the EC Internal Market. In the absence of a strong, uniform counterweight to this pressure to merge, competition in the Community could suffer or become distorted. Merger mania may mean that stagnant national economies and high unemployment could become the legacy of 1992. In light of these developments, it is likely that the Draft Regulation, in a form approximating that of the April 1988 text, will be adopted by the Council in the coming months

The Impact of EEC Competition Law on the Music Industry

The purpose of this article is to examine the relevance of EEC competition law (or antitrust law as it is known in the United States) to the music industry. EEC antitrust cases concerning other media, such as satellite broadcasting, are discussed to the extent that they are relevant. It will be shown that EEC antitrust law has a pervasive effect on the music industry and will play an important role as the industry exploits the EEC market

An alternative to the conventional micro-canonical ensemble

Usual approach to the foundations of quantum statistical physics is based on conventional micro-canonical ensemble as a starting point for deriving Boltzmann-Gibbs (BG) equilibrium. It leaves, however, a number of conceptual and practical questions unanswered. Here we discuss these questions, thereby motivating the study of a natural alternative known as Quantum Micro-Canonical (QMC) ensemble. We present a detailed numerical study of the properties of the QMC ensemble for finite quantum systems revealing a good agreement with the existing analytical results for large quantum systems. We also propose the way to introduce analytical corrections accounting for finite-size effects. With the above corrections, the agreement between the analytical and the numerical results becomes very accurate. The QMC ensemble leads to an unconventional kind of equilibrium, which may be realizable after strong perturbations in small isolated quantum systems having large number of levels. We demonstrate that the variance of energy fluctuations can be used to discriminate the QMC equilibrium from the BG equilibrium. We further suggest that the reason, why BG equilibrium commonly occurs in nature rather than the QMC-type equilibrium, has something to do with the notion of quantum collapse.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figure