IPR in Commodity Futures Contracts

The argument that granting intellectual property rights for a contract design in a specified commodity prevents healthy competition among different exchanges and instead creates monopolies, holds little water. Competition is needed in a futures market but to create healthy liquidity, facilitate orderly hedging and price making, and not between different exchanges for organising futures business in the same commodity contract. Not only does liquidity tend to become fractured in the latter case, research and development of new commodity products may come to a halt for fear that others would copy the products of successful exchanges without any costs.