Antitrust Restrictions On Intellectual Property Rights License

With the development of economy, people have reached consensus to protect the private rights, and the intellectual property law based on the private right has emerged as the time requires. For quite a long while, intellectual property rights are considered as legitimate monopoly conferred by law, and therefore exempted from antitrust examination. But some right holders abuses their IPR, especially in the field of intellectual property license, for example, applying clauses such as grant-back, limiting price, tying, unilateral refusal to license and other monopolistic behavior. We are in urgent need of the antitrust law regulation. How to regulate the behavior of intellectual property rights holders, especially the licensing of intellectual property rights, has become an important part of the antitrust law.To solve the problem, we shall first marshall through the relationship between intellectual property law and antitrust law. But with people's deeper understanding for these two concepts, the viewpoint that intellectual property and antitrust law are in "rival" has been abandoned, instead, people now believe that intellectual property and antitrust law are "partners". The two have the same value, and have a common goal-to promote economic development.The monopolistic behavior of intellectual property rights can be classified into two types: monopolistic behavior in the intellectual property license agreement and the abuse of market power. An intellectual property license agreement may include typical restrictive clauses, such as grant-back, price limit, geographical restrictions, or application limitations; abuse of market dominant position mainly include tying, unilateral refusal to license, price discrimination, restriction on challenging the validity, and etc. Regulating the above-mentioned monopolistic behavior has become one of the major issues in antitrust law. In addition, the economy is developing rapidly, new economy, new form and new features emerged, In the field of intellectual property and anti-trust law new issues of the combination of the licensing of intellectual property rights, technical standards and licensing of intellectual property rights has arisen. Such new issues brought new challenges to both intellectual property laws and the anti-trust laws.At the beginning of the establishment of intellectual property licensing system, western developed countries are also facing the same difficulty in antitrust problems. However, after years of development and modification, developed countries have been gradually building up an effective system. Europe, Japan and many other developed countries now have their unique anti-trust law in the field of intellectual property licensing. Today, our country should draw lessons from the successful experience of the developed countries. At present, the antitrust law is too principle to refine the antitrust problems. The antitrust law enforcement departments should formulate detailed rules that have operational significance, which relates to more clearly types of monopolistic behavior in the field of intellectual property licensing, to reduce the difficulty in judgement. While drawing lessons from the foreign experience, we should also combine it with our national conditions and current social situation, pay attention to the localization of legal transplant, to create a good environment for intellectual property competition.