Competition Law Issues in IP Licensing

Intellectual Property is a dynamic field which incentivizes innovation and grants certain rights to IP holders. These rights include the exclusive right to sale and distribution as well. This can lead to creation of monopoly in the markets. Competition law is attracted in such situations which is enforced primarily to ensure that there is no monopoly in the market and therefore, no abuse of dominance in the market. IP rights also include the right to exclusive licensing and such a licensing is necessary to ensure that there is no monopoly in the market but sometimes, IP licensing itself shows anti-competitive elements and therefore, it becomes important to trace the competition law issues that are faced by IP licensing. This paper will analyze how does IP licensing affect the competition in the market in US, EU and India and what are the competition law issues in IP licensing. It is hypothesized that the current framework of IP licensing follows a precautionary approach with regards to competition law with the application being more on a case-by-case basis rather than an absolute principle followed in each case. Therefore, there is need to study this nexus further to develop more efficient guidelines to deal with such cases.