The W-CDMA Patent Licensing Programme
Alan,
<< It is absurdly awkward that there is no accepted impartial academic mechanism to assign relative value to individual patents or families of patents. IMO thank god there is no such thing. >>
There is such a thing (are such things) for technology collaboratively developed within a Standards Setting Organization (SSO) or Standards Development Organization (SDO).
Specifically, in the case of 3GSM UMTS WCDMA (W-CDMA) developed and standardized within 3GPP by the members of 6 SSO/SDOs (ARIB, CCSA, ETSI, ATIS, TTA, and TTC.) the mechanism utilized by the W-CDMA Patent Licensing Programme (W-CDMA PLP), which is a patent platform, not a patent pool, has been accepted and approved by the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division (DOJ), the Japanese Fair Trade Commission (JFTC), and the European Commission, Competition Directorate (EC), and currently licenses the patent rights certified as essential by 9 major companies that have joined the program to date, covering all components of the 3GPP standards from Release 3 (R'99) and beyond: Koreas's ETRI, Fujitsu, KPN, Mitsubishi, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, NTT, Sharp and Siemens.
The four companies (Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, QUALCOMM) with the majority of uncertified but declared essential patents have chosen not to join the program -- so one could legitimately quibble over the word "accepted" in the context in which you used it.
Background and an overview of the mechanism are described in detail in this book which is available in hardcover or electronic form ...
tinyurl.com
An much shorter overview of the program in slide format presented in May to the ETSI General Assembly Intellectual Property Rights Group (ETSI GA-IPR) is available here ...
3glicensing.com
A complete list of all W-CDMA PLP IPEC certified essential patents (as of June 2006) and a short overview of the IPEC certification process for essential patents is here ...
Message 22603155
Best,
- Eric - |
