Coffee & Standards A Practitioner's Guide

By David Rudin

Coffee & Standards

A Practitioner's Guide to Standards, IP, Governance, and the Long Game

The guide that didn't exist — the judgment layer behind the agreements, patent policies, and governance that shape how the world's technology connects.

Start with the Foreword Browse Contents Download Full Book (PDF)

What's this book about?

Technical standards shape how the world's technology connects — from the web protocols that power the internet to the video codecs that stream your content. But the agreements behind those standards are rarely understood, even by the attorneys and engineers who work with them every day.

This is the book that didn't exist. Written by a practitioner who has spent over two decades building the legal frameworks used by organizations like the Alliance for Open Media, the Joint Development Foundation, and the Open Web Foundation, it is the operational handbook for advising on a standards engagement from first contact to final publication.

Read it and you will know how to:

  • Read an IPR policy and spot what's outside the range of reasonable
  • Get scope, necessary claims, and exclusions right, and understand why those three decisions drive most of the risk
  • Navigate multi-party negotiation where there is no judge, no bilateral deal, and everyone across the table is a repeat player
  • Recognize the parts of the work that are theater, and manage them accordingly

No treatise. No academic theory. Just the judgment layer — the tradeoffs, the patterns, and the practical knowledge that comes from doing the work long enough to have seen most of the problems more than once.

Although the examples are drawn from standards work, the lessons travel. The instincts you develop advising in this space — reading governance machinery, building consensus where there is no judge to compel it, distinguishing process from substance, managing repeat players over a multi-year horizon, and knowing when the rules matter more than the merits — are the same instincts that distinguish strong counsel in commercial transactions, joint ventures, regulated industries, open source, and any practice where the work is collaborative and the relationships outlast the deal.

Written for standards and IP counsel, and for the engineers, governance professionals, business leaders, and lawyers in other practices who sit at the table with them.

The Book

Eighteen chapters across four parts — from IP foundations through real-world negotiation strategy.

Part I

Foundations

  1. 1What Is a Standard and Why Should You Care?
  2. 2The Organizational Landscape: Types of Standards Bodies
  3. 3The Intellectual Property Landscape of Standards
  4. 4Due Process, Best Practices, and the Antitrust Connection
  5. 5Open Source and Standards: The Convergence

Part II

Patent Policies — The Core Of Standards Ip

  1. 6Necessary Claims: The Heart of Patent Policy
  2. 7RAND and Royalty-Bearing Standards
  3. 8Royalty-Free Patent Policies and the Exclusion Mechanism
  4. 9Non-Asserts, Pledges, and Covenants
  5. 10Patent Policy in Practice: Pitfalls, Applications, and Theater

Part III

GOVERNANCE, PROCESS, And Getting Things Done

  1. 11Standards Governance Structures
  2. 12Decision-Making and Voting
  3. 13Specification Development and Finalization

Part IV

Practice And Reflection

  1. 14The Art of Multi-Party Negotiation in Standards
  2. 15Practical Advice for the Standards Attorney
  3. 16Lessons from Two Decades of Practice
  4. 17Crystal Ball: Where Standards and Open Source Are Headed
  5. 18Closing Thoughts: What It All Adds Up To

Appendices

Reference Material

  1. AGlossary of Standards Terminology
  2. BStandards Engagement Checklist for Counsel
  3. CStandards Wars: A Case Study
About the AuthorDavid Rudin — Microsoft CELA
"The skills that make you effective in litigation or bilateral contract negotiation will actively hurt you in standards. What works instead is something closer to diplomacy." — From the Foreword