| Vertical Price Control and Parallel Imports (1999) | |||||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||||
| Parallel imports are genuine products brought into a country without the autho-rization of a copyright, patent, or trademark owner. Countries vary considerably in their legal treatment of parallel imports, as determined by their choice of exhaustion doctrine. A policy of national exhaustion says that rights to control distribution end upon …rst sale only within a country, thereby permitting rights holders to ex-clude parallel imports. A policy of international exhaustion states that such rights endupon…rstsaleanywhereandthereforepermitsparallelimports. TheEuropean Union has a policy of regional exhaustion within its territory. Language in the TRIPS agreement of the World Trade Organization suggests that this policy choice remains the prerogative of individual countries. We review the international policy debate about parallel imports, which are con-troversial because they erode the ability of intellectual property owners to segment markets. For example, over considerable opposition Australia recently deregulated its import controls in major copyrighted goods because domestic prices were evidently sustained at high levels by those controls. Both the European Union and the United | |||||||||||||||
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