'Compulsory Licensing of Intellectual Property' by Enrico Bonadio in Cristiana Sappa (ed), Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Inclusivity (Elgar, 2024) comments
A specific IP built-in limitation to IP rights is compulsory licencing. Compulsory licences are mostly known in patent and to a lesser extent plant variety and copyright laws, while they are extremely rare in trademark law. The essence of an IP compulsory licence is that the authorisation to exploit the protected asset (e.g., an invention, a plant variety, a copyrighted work or a brand) does not come from the right holder. It comes from the government or the judiciary instead.
The chapter focuses on this IP flexibility and notes how this legal and policy tool re-aims at introducing elements of inclusivity into IP regimes. It argues that compulsory licences, if granted in line with the relevant requirements under international and national laws, cannot be considered a negation of IP rights. Indeed, exceptions to IP are part of the very IP regimes which grant exclusive rights in the first place: in other words, they constitute the other side of the same coin.
