By Konstantinos Karachalios
IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. With more than 423,000 members, IEEE is a trusted voice for engineering, computing, and technology information around the globe. The IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA), which oversees IEEE standards development, is a leading consensus building organization that nurtures, develops, and advances global technologies. With collaborative thought leaders in more than 160 countries, IEEE-SA promotes innovation, enables the creation and expansion of international markets, and helps protect health and public safety. Its work drives the functionality, capabilities, and interoperability of a wide range of products and services that transform the way people live, work, and communicate.
Innovation at IEEE is responsible for many ubiquitous standards such as IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi®), IEEE 802.15 (Bluetooth®), IEEE 802.3 (Ethernet) and hundreds of other widely used standards that affect and improve our daily lives. Recently we have become aware of concerted efforts to diminish IEEE’s reputation and denounce its integrity through misinformation regarding the nature and impact of its updated standards-related patent policy. This paper will show that the arguments made are misleading and false, and demonstrate how IEEE is continuing to flourish as the world’s leading venue for innovation and standardization.
There is ample evidence that the analysis, selection, interpretation of data, and the conclusions of the report titled ‘Development of innovative new standards jeopardized by IEEE patent policy’ (subsequently called ‘the report’) are misinformed. The statistics regarding the increase in IEEE standards development projects belie the insinuations in the report that the 2015 update of the patent policy puts IEEE in a poor position to maintain its standardization activities. In addition, the report confuses a mere voluntary recommendation made on the SSPPU (smallest selling patent-practicing unit) with the four binding principles of the updated IEEE patent policy and it misinterprets these four binding principles. At a higher level, the report does not take into consideration the emergence of new technology landscapes (IoT, for instance) and the purpose of IEEE to promote technology for humanity, not for specific regions, industry sectors, or for single companies against the rest of the world. All available data show that IEEE has not ceased to be a forum for innovative standards development and achieves one historic record after the other, as we will show in this article. A flourishing standardization system with a large number and variety of market relevant standards is a boon also for patent holders, leading thus ad absurdum to the allegation that the updated patent policy is a means to ‘significantly undermine rights of patent owners’ or ‘deprive them of their ability to receive adequate compensation.’
By background, Wise Harbor was commissioned by the IP Europe Alliance to produce the report attempting to illustrate the supposedly many flaws of the updated IEEE patent policy. IP Europe Alliance claims that it is the voice of IP intensive European companies. While the descriptive part of the report puts forward the arguments of this industry association, it does little to advance the current state of substantive understanding of the question (for example there is no literature review and hardly any reference to the academic literature), and the empirical part of the report, which is not complete in its analysis, seeks only to provide statistical arguments in support of the Alliance’s position. In several instances, arguments made are inflammatory and emotional rather than reasoned, which is just another illustration of the questionable academic merits of the ‘study’. Allegations against IEEE are made, which are often not substantiated by facts. The report is single-minded, incomplete in argument, and leaps to conclusions that do not necessarily seem to be accurate by academic or professional standards. The mere purpose of the report appears to be to portray IEEE as an organization that jeopardizes the development of standards, a position which the funders of the report are apparently desperate to try to establish in policy circles on both sides of the Atlantic.
Furthermore, the report itself recognizes that one cannot make an impact assessment within such a small time period since the introduction of the updated patent policy. Yet, the author consciously chose to ignore his own statement and continued to address the supposedly many consequences the updated IEEE patent policy has triggered. The author’s approach is demonstrative of the short-comings of the overall paper by offering a suspect argument with limited data and then draws sweeping and broadly based conclusions on less than three years of the updated patent policy.
Contrary to what the report sponsored by the IP Europe Alliance asserts, the IEEE-SA has not observed any decline in growth or interest in its standardization work. It furthermore maintains that the clarity provided by the updated patent policy does not devalue intellectual property. Rather, the updated patent policy elucidates some core definitions of what the FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) commitment for standards essential patents (SEPs) entails and in doing so, decreases transaction costs for both licensors and licensees.
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