Standardization and Patent Licensing in the European Union

The interaction between IPRs and standards has lately raised growing concerns in the information and communication technology (ICT) industry. These highly controversial issues include industry standards embracing proprietary technologies, excessive royalties for the use of proprietary technologies, [...]
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The interaction between IPRs and standards has lately raised growing concerns in the information and communication technology (ICT) industry. These highly controversial issues include industry standards embracing proprietary technologies, excessive royalties for the use of proprietary technologies, and the refusal to grant licenses for the use of proprietary technologies. This book examines the patent licensing practice in the ICT industry, the EU's regulation on intellectual property licensing and standardization, aims to find out how best to balance standardization and access to essential patents. Two traditional approaches to facilitating exploitation of patented technology have been evaluated. The study finds that the market approach that suggests transaction can distribute technological resource to the one that value it most may not be effective because of the poor quality of patents in the industry and the high transaction costs resulting from the high fragmentation of technology and the use of patent for strategy purpose, and the intervention approach that suggests applying compulsory license or rules of abuse of patent against patent holders may ignores right holder's subjective valuation of rights and disrupt right holder's plan to exploit the right based on that valuation, therefore stifling the motivation to innovation. Thus, the book suggests that a cooperative scheme that facilitates licensing of industry wide generally used technology, which mixes the market and intervention approaches, may be effective. A cooperative scheme may not only manage and share existing resources but also engage in producing those resources and encourage the creation of new resources in the future. Dr. Liguo Zhang was a researcher of the IPR University Center during 2007-2011. He has been working on the interaction between patents and standardization. He was a visiting scholar at Mar Planck Institute for Intellectual Property Law and the University of Bayreuth. He has published several articles in prestigious intellectual property law journals.