30. Do standards organizations recognize intellectual property or provide mechanisms to address the confidential nature of specific contributions?

Standards organizations do not all have the same rules with respect to Intellectual Property. There are different obligations concerning necessary declarations and also different licensing schemes. Depending on the regime adopted by an organization, participants in standardization work may have the obligation to signal patents and other IPR reading on a particular specification. Also, once a patent is declared, there are different schemes going from no obligation at all via a commitment license under Fair Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory conditions to a requirement to offer all implementers a Non-Discriminatory and Royalty Free license.

When making submissions to standardization processes, your project should take the differences in IPR licensing regimes into account, as these may be relevant in view of the objectives your project or your project consortium partners pursue with their standards work. However, regardless of the IPR regime a standards body is working under, most standardization processes are open, i.e. documents discussed are accessible to all the organization's members. Nevertheless, in specific situations, mechanisms usually exist for keeping contributions confidential, or to discuss issues in a confidential environment.

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See also

  1. How do standardization processes work
  2. Can a project be a member of a standards organization
  3. What are Open Standards

Created by Bart Brusse & Rigo Wenning
last updated $Date: 2007/01/15 15:51:53 $