The use of agreements or concerted practices to keep parallel goods out of the European Union may result in a competition-law violation. Regardless of the status of the intellectual property rights embodied in goods first sold outside of the European Economic Area(EEA), the combination of restrictive agreements prohibiting export to the European Union, combined with a selective distribution system within the EEA that is in a position to exploit the resultant higher price in the market, could be found to violate Article 81 of the EC treaty. As the European Court of Justice slowly delineates the complexities of intellectual property exhaustion, the competition-law issues raised by global parallel trade may come to overshadow the intellectual property considerations that have driven Court of Justice jurisprudence.