Why Intellectual Property May Create Competition Problems

Abstract:     
Market economies historically led the stimulus to creation to a model where the author has an exclusive right to exploit economically its work. Such exclusiveness is however "artificial", as long as the information, once effected to the public, naturally spreads out without inherent constraints, therefore undermining the initial scarceness, which would drive its production. The concoction of exclusive rights, introducing an extrinsic constraint to general access to information, fulfills the need to adequate the production of technological and expressive creations to the market environment.

This brief study, which is an extract of a longer research on the intersection of Intellectual Property and competition policies in South America, weights the comparative legal approaches of treating those exclusive rights as monopolies or property, with the purpose to enlighten such intersections in a cross-doctrinal environment.

Keywords: Intellectual Property, competition, monopoly, property

Working Paper Series