Competition Policy and Prevention of Abuses in the TRIPS Agreement

The monopoly granted through intellectual property rights can lead to abuses of such monopoly. The TRIPS Agreement recognizes such abuses along with the fact that competition policy can play a significant role in dealing with such abuses. The use of competition policy to deal with the abuse of IP monopolies requires a discussion of abuse of the dominant position, definition of market and substitutability of products and whether the patenting monopoly automatically puts the right holder in the dominant position. The issue of par allel trade and exhaustion of rights also has anti-competitive implications. The introduction of discriminatory pricing along with any ban on parallel trade would lead to absolute market control, market segregation and market exclusion by the monopolistic industries.