IP As Property / IP Rights Licensing / International Licensing

1. Introduction

Licensing of intellectual property rights outside the United States contains all of the challenges associated with such licensing in this country and a number of additional ones. The additional challenges have both cultural and legal aspects. Although this paper will concentrate primarily on legal issues, it is worth bearing in mind that some cultures have a very different attitude to the law and legal issues from ours. For example, throughout the Far East, where the influence of Confucius remains strong, there remains an underlying feeling that the need to resort to law is in some way "improper". One should be able to resolve problems by discussion and proper consideration of the other side's position. In other countries, where the importance of the law is fully recognized, but where reliance has traditionally been based on the wording of codes or legislation to define relationships between parties, one can still find a tendency to produce agreements that seem extremely skimpy by our standards and to do little more than state certain concepts. Nevertheless there has been a general tendency in recent years towards the adoption of detailed written contracts for licensing of intellectual property rights throughout the world. The basic reason for this has of course been that the more specific one can be in defining what an agreement is about at the time when the parties are keen to cooperate with each other, the less likelihood there is that there will be misunderstandings and disputes later on if the relationship becomes more problematical.