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Götting, Horst-Peter; Hetmank, Sven --- "The Scope of Patent Protection for Spare Parts and its Extension through Other Tools of Intellectual Property" [2009] ELECD 252; in Takenka, Toshiko (ed), "Patent Law and Theory" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009)

Book Title: Patent Law and Theory

Editor(s): Takenka, Toshiko

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845424138

Section: Chapter 17

Section Title: The Scope of Patent Protection for Spare Parts and its Extension through Other Tools of Intellectual Property

Author(s): Götting, Horst-Peter; Hetmank, Sven

Number of pages: 13

Extract:

17 The scope of patent protection for spare
parts and its extension through other tools
of intellectual property
Horst-Peter Götting and Sven Hetmank



1 Introduction
In many cases a patentee is not only interested in controlling primary markets,
for example production and distribution of a protected device; his interest also
extends to the sector producing spare parts and operating materials that are
needed to use the protected invention. This so-called secondary market can be
very profitable because it may simply materialize or it can be stimulated with
little effort. Therefore, primary products such as vacuum cleaners, ink jet
printers or coffee pod machines are often sold at a reduced price to cut the deal
on the secondary market. In addition to well-known strategies such as tying,
exclusive dealing and creating technical incompatibilities, firms increasingly
use intellectual property rights in order to control those secondary markets.
This chapter will give a survey of the scope of patent protection from the
perspective of the spare parts market (Section 2). Besides this it may be of
interest how patent protection can be supported by other tools of intellectual
property and how allocation of secondary markets is dealt with in other
branches of intellectual property law (Section 3). This will finally lead to some
notes on antitrust law (Section 4) and the question of justification of market
foreclosure in spare part markets through intellectual property rights (Section
5).

2 The scope of patent protection for spare parts
It is well ...