Study on the Interplay between Standards and Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs)

Fraunhofer FOKUS
Prof. Dr. Knut Blind
Müller-Breslau-Straße
D-10623 Berlin
Mail: Knut.Blind@fokus.fraunhofer.de
Tel: +49 (0) 30 314 76670
Fax: +49 (0) 30 314 76628

Introduction

The Study on the Interplay between Standards and Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) was commissioned in December 2009 by the Enterprise and Industry Directorate General to a consortium under the coordination of the Fraunhofer-Society in Germany. The aim of this fact-finding study is to provide a sound factual basis on the above interplay for possible policy development in the area of European standardisation and innovation. In the context of the study, we conduct a survey among enterprises owning IPRs (intellectual property rights) as well as enterprises implementing standards. The copyright on the standardization documents as such is not considered.

In the survey, we focus on essential IPRs, in general patents, which disclose and claim inventions that are required to implement a given standard. It can be either used according to Fair Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) licensing conditions or Royalty Free (RF; understood as royalty free licensing that may be subject to other FRAND conditions). We cover standards, which are released either by formal standardisation bodies, like ISO, IEC, ITU, CEN-CENELEC, ETSI and the various national standardisation bodies, or by standardisation consortia, like IEEE, IETF, OASIS, OMA or W3C. In general, we cover all such organisations under the term standards setting organisations (SSOs).

We have identified your enterprise based on public available information as either owning essential IPRs or having implemented especially standards containing IPRs. Your participation will take about 20 minutes and will help to produce an objective and representative picture of the issue and also a benchmarking of your company's behaviour in relation to the other companies active in the market.

We ask you to answer the questionnaire by October 31st, 2010.


Please note that we will treat your answers to our questions absolutely confidentially!