Link – Nokia vs. Apple: the in-depth analysis
Engadget recently posted an interesting article that gives a lot of good background on patent issues in standards setting organizations.
Wireless standards like GSM are developed by a standards-setting body with the cooperation of its members -- in the case of GSM and UMTS, it's the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and with WiFi it's the familiar IEEE. These organizations aren't blind to the fact that its members invest billions into R&D and have lots of patents, but they also recognize the need to develop standards that everyone can use -- so while a standard like GSM is under development, member companies are supposed to declare if they own any patents they think are essential to the standard's operation. What Nokia doesn't say is that there's no independent verification of a patent's essentialness during the standards process -- in other words, the ETSI and the IEEE don't maintain some master list of patents that are actually essential. Instead, each company that participates in developing a standard is basically on the honor system, and they all agree to abide by FRAND principles when negotiating licenses. That means there's a tremendous incentive to declare as many patents as possible to be essential, since anyone who wants to use the spec might have to pay license fees on all those patents, and not declaring a patent essential can result in various other unpleasant consequences. (Legal nerds will remember the Rambus case as an example of this: the short and highly-simplified version is that Rambus didn't declare it had patents on certain types of RAM, and years of litigation ensued.)
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