Shruti Khanijow & Sugandha Nayak in this article talk about the Intellectual property arbitration and explains how its emergence merits serious consideration.
Abstract
Intellectual property arbitration can be defined as an arbitral procedure in which at least one intellectual property right is in issue. Intellectual property is the source of many of the most dynamic world enterprises. It is the foundation of the publishing industry, the entertainment industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and the most rapidly developing industry of all–that based on information technology. The computer industry generates much of the interest in intellectual property with the vast commercial activity in new genres of work such as semiconductor designs, computer programs and digital databases. Only the exercise or the challenge of the intellectual property right, or the contesting of the existence or the validity of an intellectual property right, makes the dispute an intellectual property dispute.
Intellectual Property Arbitration refers to methods of resolving IP disputes without having to start court proceedings. IP disputes are resolved in aid of expert opinions. Increasingly, arbitration is chosen as a means of objective, amicable and final adjudication of commercial disputes. Thus, the emergence of arbitration of intellectual property matters is a study which merits serious consideration.
IP addresses principally the allocation of rights under license agreements. Similar considerations exist with respect to arbitration involving matter such as anti-trust, securities regulation and bankruptcy. These dispute all implacable public rights, whose violation could result in a loss to society at large, which never signed the agreement to arbitrate. It is the sovereign prerogative of the state to grant legal protection to IP rights, conferring certain exclusive rights on the beneficiary to use and to exploit the IP in question These rights need to be registered with a governmental or quasi-governmental agency, which alone can grant amend or revoke these rights and determine their scope.