Competition Law Issues In Intellectual Property Licensing Study

Intellectual property laws endow exclusive rights to IP holders. The way of using IP mayimpair competition and do harm to public. For a long time, it has been an important issue forcompetition law on how to regulate the using of IP.In the beginning, the main theory regarded the IP laws antagonistic to competition laws. Buta few years later, the theory changed, and regarded the IP laws and competition laws have thesame goal. On the interface between IP laws and competition laws, there are different theories.Those influence the policies on how to regulate the use of IP rights.America, Europe Union (EU) and Japan have typical system of competition laws. How toregulate the use of IP rights is an important portion of competition laws. America, EU and Japaneffectively regulate the restrictive practice in the area of IP license by the enforcement of theircompetitions laws.There are many restrictive articles in the IP license contracts, such as articles on tying, grantback, restrict on price, restrict on practice area, restrict on practice field, restrict on challenging thevalidity of IP, etc. How to regulate these restrictive articles is important to competition laws, and itis the main part of the IP license Guidelines of America, EU and Japan. Except these restrictivearticles, other restrictive practice such as refusing to license, price discrimination, can also bringcompetition problems. In the New Economy period, the creation of IP and the output of theeconomy and the consumption are different from before. It provides facility for IP holders to usetheir IP rights as leverage and gain excessive interests from IP. IP pools and integration of IP totechnical standards influence IP license and bring new restrictive problems.The technical level of China is lower than that of the developed countries. At present, in orderto use the latest technique, we often need to get license from the IP holders. In the same time, thedeveloped countries use IP strategy to fix their super station on technology and economy. The bigmultinational companies use IP strategy as means to enlarging and developing. Though we haveGeneral Rules of the Civil Law, Contract Law, Foreign Trade Law, and IP laws, the regulation onthe IP license is very limited. The restrictive practice in the area of IP license cannot be effectivelyregulated by the current laws. We must study the theory of IP laws and competition laws, useothers countries' successful experience as reference, revise China's unfair Competition Law, issueAntimonopoly Law, enact new regulations and guidelines on IP license, set up enforcementauthority. Through these means, we can regulate the practice of IP license, and build competitionenvironment of IP license.