Published: April 25, 2018
Publisher: IAM
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is the world’s largest technical professional organization, with hundreds of thousands of members. As a US-based standard-setting organization (SSO), the IEEE has successfully standardized thousands of fundamental technologies, including critical communications standards such as Wi-Fi and ethernet. In 2015 the IEEE updated its patent licensing policy, which addresses how participants at the IEEE commit to license their standard-essential patents (SEPs), covering IEEE standards on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. In response to claims that the IEEE’s standardization work was adversely affected by the policy update, this report presents a careful empirical analysis of the IEEE’s standard-setting work since 2015.
There are multiple metrics by which one might evaluate the strength and health of an SSO such as the IEEE. One metric that is not particularly helpful is to count the number of declared SEPs submitted to the IEEE as letters of assurance. Theoretically, counting the number of submitted letters of assurance may provide some insight into which companies most actively support technical development for an IEEE standard. However, this does not apply for the IEEE as most submitted letters of assurance are so-called ‘blanket’ declarations that do not specify particular patents and make blanket statements for any and all SEPs that a submitting company may own. Most standard contributors will submit blanket statements only once at the beginning of the standard project so that the number of blanket letters of assurance submitted over time will by design often decrease. Blanket statements are thus neither quantifiable nor updated (ie, even if an IEEE member contributes to an IEEE standard and files new patents relevant for the standard, these patents are covered by earlier letters of assurance and new submissions are optional).