독점 금지법과 지적재산권 라이센스

Abstract

In the market economy the intellectual property laws and antitrust law share a common purpose of promoting innovation and enhancing consumer welfare, even though they seem to have a possibility to crash each other. The reason is that intellectual property rights provide incentives for innovation through giving a monopoly right for a certain period, while antitrust law is aiming to prevent misuse of predominant position in the market place and concentration of overriding. In the field of intellectual property rights the owners make profits through using their rights by themselves as well as through licensing contract. The licensing contract is, however, likely to be applied by antitrust law in accordance with under which conditions and restraints a licensing contract is concluded, and herein many complicated constituents get introduced. With this respect, countries such as America, Japan and Korea established their own guidelines in order to assist those who want to predict whether a licensing practice would be regarded as anti-competitive. In particular, it is noticed that with its enlargement European Union has published a new Regulation No. 772/2004 and Guidelines regarding technology transfer which came into effect on 1 May 2004, and will have a dramatic impact on technology licensing in the European Union. With the article I gave an overview of major anti-competitive constituents in the guidelines of each country and compared and analyzed them.