Intellectual Property Licensing Agreements, The Antitrust Laws

The intellectual property right is an exclusive right. Intellectualproperty licensing, with the basic form of the licensing agreement ofintellectual property right, transfers other rights under the condition ofkeeping property ownership. For the licenser, a license agreement is aneffective way to exercise their rights and improve economic benefits. For thelicensee, the license agreement is the most direct and lawful form of obtainingthe right to use intellectual property. Intellectual property licensing isinductive to the promotion of technology transformation, an effectivecombination of intellectual property with other production elements and theincrease of social welfare. However, intellectual property right licensingnecessarily brings about negative effects, the most prominent of which liesin the fact that owners of intellectual property right put forward restrictiveclauses in order to constrain competition. In response, the world's majorcountries and regions boast relevant laws and regulations to regulate thesystem, but China's existing laws and regulations have gaps so that they cannot effectively regulate and restrict competition provisions. Improvement ofthe legal environment of the intellectual property license and regulation ofChina's markets and competition concerning intellectual property licensingrestrictions have become an urgent task of the legislative branch of thegovernment.This thesis, consisting of four parts, expounds anti-trust legal issuesof intellectual property license agreement. The first part introduces theintellectual property license agreement and explains related issues ofintellectual property licensing and its agreement. The second part focuseson the relations between competition-restricting provisions of intellectualproperty licensing agreements and anti-monopoly law. It also analyzes thelimits of competition-restricting clauses of intellectual property licensingagreements as well as the advantages of anti-monopoly law. The third partanalyzes specifically common competition-restricting provisions of theintellectual property license agreement. The fourth part focuses on relevantlegislation of our current regulatory system of intellectual property licenseagreement and the existing problems and puts forward legislative proposals of how to perfect the anti-monopoly law regulation of the intellectualproperty license agreement.