76It must be observed that, according to the very wording of the questions referred, the background to those agreements is a genuine dispute relating to a process patent, that dispute being the subject of proceedings before a national court. Accordingly, those agreements cannot be regarded as agreements bringing to an end entirely fictitious disputes, or as designed with the sole aim of disguising a market-sharing agreement or a market-exclusion agreement. When agreements are of that nature, they are as harmful to competition as market-sharing agreements or market-exclusion agreements, and such agreements have to be characterised as ‘restrictions by object’.
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