The Chicago Board Options Exchange, along with several other plaintiffs, has filed an intellectual property suit against the International Securities Exchange LLC.

Joining CBOE as plaintiffs in this lawsuit are The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. and its Standard & Poor’s Division and Dow Jones & Company Inc., which exclusively license the CBOE to list and trade options based, respectively, on the S&P 500 Index (SPX options) and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJX options).

The CBOE lawsuit seeks a ruling that ISE may not list or trade SPX options or DJX options, because of CBOE’s exclusive license rights to those options. On November 2, the ISE sued Dow Jones and S&P in federal court in New York, seeking a declaration that ISE was entitled to trade SPX and DJX options without a license. The CBOE says it has brought its lawsuit in Illinois because it believes that Illinois is the appropriate forum for the resolution of this dispute.

“CBOE initiated this action in order to enforce our contractual rights with our partners, S&P and Dow Jones. Those rights were firmly established by legal precedent set years ago in Illinois,” said CBOE chairman and CEO William Brodsky.

“ISE was founded on the belief that competition among exchanges improves market efficiency and, ultimately, benefits investors,” said David Krell, ISE’s president and CEO, upon filing its original suit. “We have witnessed this occurrence for equity, ETF, and certain index options since ISE announced its entry into the market eight years ago, providing the spark that ended the practice of exclusively listing options on only one exchange. As a result of ISE’s leadership, the market has experienced increased liquidity, tighter spreads, and lower customer transaction fees, and we want to deliver those same benefits to investors in the remaining exclusively-listed index options.”