Intellectual Property and EU Competition Law

The interface between intellectual property rights and competition policy is one of the most important and difficult areas of EU commercial law. The exploitation of exclusive rights can conflict with competition law, which aims to preserve competition as the driving force in efficient markets. These conflicts have to be resolved against the background of a complicated relationship between EU law, national laws and international treaties relating to intellectual property. There have been major developments recently in this area, including the new Technology Transfer Block Exemption, the Commission's Guidelines on Technology Transfer, and cases such as IMS and Microsoft concerning the circumstances in which exploitation of intellectual property rights is an abuse of a dominant position.

This book contains a detailed explanation of the application of EU competition law to all types of intellectual property, including recent developments, and the resulting regulatory framework for the exploitation and licensing of intellectual property rights. It has practical analysis of such issues as technology transfer and pools, research and development, and franchising and merchandising.

It derives from a section in the looseleaf Law of the EU (Vaughan & Robertson, eds), and is made available here for the benefit of those who do not subscribe to the looseleaf.