This course will explore the challenges lawyers, enforcers and policymakers face when considering innovation and digital markets. It will explore competition and market regulation, particularly covering competition law and policy, but also including reflections on intellectual property and digital regulation. This course aims to depart from a siloed approach to law, emphasising to students that there are interactions between different fields of law and different regulatory bodies.

The course would focus on European and US law, as is currently the case for the whole of the programme. It may compare the approaches in these jurisdictions to international approaches, where relevant.

This course could cover, indicatively, following topics:

■ Monopoly, innovation, and creative destruction

■ The economics of digital markets

■ Research and development collaboration agreements

■ SEPs and patent hold-up

■ Innovation markets

■ Platforms, gatekeeping, and regulation

■ Data considerations in merger control and dominance cases

■ Oligopoly and algorithms

■ Market power in digital creative industries and news publishing

■ Competition, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence

10 x 2-hour seminars (semester 2)

The course is assessed by an essay of 1500 words (25%) and a 2- hour final examination (75%)

The course aims to build on previous knowledge of market regulation to explore how fields of law, regulation and policy addressing competition are shaped by and enforced in innovative contexts, with a particular focus on the digital economy.

In particular the course aims to:

■ Encourage the critical analysis of law in context of recent policy developments and debates in the area of digital markets.

■ Explain the economic and legal issues that arise in applying competition law and IP law in the digital economy: from the use and acquisition of market power to cooperation amount to collusion/anti-competitive agreements.

■ Develop an understanding of how competition law or may interact with intellectual property, in the context of the digital economy

■ Encourage in depth and independent study and learning

■ Further develop problem-solving skills and research skills.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

■ Be able to explain how competition and innovation may critically interact in digital markets.

■ Have a critical understanding of the economic characteristics of digital markets; and how this impacts the application of EU and US law towards agreements and towards conduct by undertakings with market power

■ Have a critical understanding of how intellectual property law and competition law interact in relation to digital markets · Be able to use research methods on law efficiently

■ Be able to explain relevant economic concepts in general terms

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.