Antitrust Regulation Of Franchise

Franchising has been proved to be a kind of business and trade operation suited to the marked-oriented economy's scale, globalization and optimization resource's distribution. Since its emergence in America in 19th century, this win-win situation prompted the flood of franchise growth in the world, proved by more than one hundred years' history of development investment choice, which has the highest rate of success.In franchise, a franchisor (or franchise right owner) offers a franchisee his own trade mark, corporate name, patent or exclusive technology in the form of contract. This involves transference of intellectual property, right of selling goods, technology and skills. Yet intellectual property's legal monopolization is a decisive factor of franchisor's right in restricting franchisee's activities in there contract to some extent. At the same time, franchise also involves three parties of franchisor, franchisee, and other relevant competitors and includes competitive relation in terms of the horizontal and vertical levels. Besides, a franchisor tends to use his advantages to abuse his rights, restricting competition against the anti-monopoly law such as tied selling, resale price maintenance and regional restrictions, when he sign a contract with a franchisor. Therefore, though a franchisor's right of legal monopoly should be protected, legislations' and regulations relevant to a franchisor's behaviors of restricting competition by means of abusing his right should be made in anti-monopoly law.Though the analysis of behaviors of restricting competition that may occur in franchise, the thesis aims at making a comparative study of legislations and regulations in anti-monopoly law in west countries such as U.S. and E.U., and putting forward the writer's ideas in order to contribute to legislations and regulations in Chinese anti-monopoly law in franchise. The theme of thesis is introduced by describing the development of franchise in all countries. Foreword: Introduce the select title meaning of this text; draw the subject of this text. The First Part: Have originally introduced the concept of franchise operation partly, has analyzed the legal characteristic of franchise operation. The Second Part: Distinguishing the difference between franchise and its related concepts, limits the form of expression of the competition behavior mainly in some key research franchise operation: pair unsolvable up with goods that sell well, keep reselling prices, territorial restriction. The Third Part: Originally some comprehensive comparative research European Union, competition law of U.S.A., limit the structure of the competition behavior to franchise operation, tries to analyze the differences between them. The Forth Part: Introduce our country legislative situation of franchise operation correctly and point out of our country anti-monopoly law limit competition weak point, behavior of structure to franchise operation at first part partly originally. In the End: The author confirms the argument, emphasizes the importance of the anti-monopoly law.