Event Information

Pat Treacy and Francion Brooks will be conducting a workshop on ‘IP Licensing & Competition Law’. For many businesses, IP rights are valuable assets – and licensing is one of the main ways of exploiting them. Other firms need IP licences to get their products and services to market.

The workshop will cover the following topics:

The basics

• Relationship between IP and competition law
• Key characteristics of IP licence agreements
• EU competition law’s approach to such agreements and their potential pro- and anti-competitive effects
• Impact of related transactions
• Consequences of infringing competition law

The competition law framework for IP licensing:

• Article 101 TFEU and the block exemption ‘safe harbours’
• The 2014 Technology Transfer Block Exemption (TTBE) and accompanying Guidelines – purpose and scope
• Potentially problematic IP licence clauses under Article 101 and the TTBE
• Issues to watch out for under Article 102 TFEU
• Recent case law on competition law and IP licensing (e.g. CJEU preliminary reference in Genentech v Hoechst; developments in the treatment of non-challenge clauses)

For more information and to register, please see the MBL website.