Forty-one organizations expressed their support for IEEE-SA’s patent policy in a letter to the standards organization. The 2015 IEEE-SA policy change is the prime example of a standard setting organization demonstrating leadership in providing clarity on the meaning of fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) commitments to make access to key standards like WiFi much more certain and manageable.
The goal of this letter is to support IEEE-SA in light of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division’s recent unprecedented and partisan decision to revise its 2015 business review letter that supported IEEE-SA’s changes back then. That recent unilateral revision by DOJ is now fueling calls from some SEP holders to have IEEE-SA start a process to reverse the updates to its IPR policy. To read the full text of the letter, click here. More detail on the policy changes before IEEE-SA is available here.