Antitrust Issues in International Intellectual Property Licensing Transactions

This book provides a review of the application of the antitrust and competition laws of nineteen leading jurisdictions around the world to common issues arising in patent, copyright and trademark licensing agreements. The volume is intended to serve as a comprehensive overview for those seeking to understand how various jurisdictions approach the intersection of intellectual property and competition law as well as a practical reference guide for practitioners and corporate counsel dealing with specific licensing issues in individual jurisdictions or in global licensing agreements.

The volume results from extensive work by leading antitrust and intellectual property experts in the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, the European Union and six individual European countries, Israel, South Africa, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand. Each chapter begins with a brief overview of the jurisdiction's antitrust or competition laws and intellectual property laws. The main section of each chapter analyzes the application of the jurisdiction's antitrust or competition law to IP licensing issues. Each chapter is organized according to a series of topics that frequently arise in the context of licensing of intellectual property in order to facilitate country-to-country comparisons and location of precedent relevant to a particular issue.

Each discussion begins with general topics, including safe harbor provisions and refusals to license intellectual property. Each chapter focuses on common restraints in unidirectional license agreements, including exclusive licenses, royalty provisions, price restrictions, field of use, territorial and customer limitations, tying and bundling arrangements, restrictions on research and development, grantback obligations and no-challenge provisions. Each chapter also covers restraints accompanying mutual or multilateral licensing arrangements, including provisions in cross-licensing agreements and patent pooling arrangements. Each chapter contains discussion of and citations to relevant statutes and regulations, court judgments, administrative decisions, agency guidelines and academic writings. This volume is truly unprecedented in its scope of coverage of the application of competition laws to intellectual property licensing arrangements around the world and will be a key resource for both antitrust and intellectual property practitioners in the field.