Intellectual Property Rights And Standards Setting Organizations: An Overview Of Failed Evolution

Carl Cargill, Director of Standardization, Sun Microsystems

1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 3/27/2002)

Over the past fifteen years, there has been a tremendous growth in the number, type and nature of Standards Setting Organizations (SSOs). The globalization of the market, the expansion of multi-national companies, and the increased availability and accessibility of networking have heightened the need for standardized solutions within the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) industry. Unfortunately, the evolution of SSOs - including organizational structures, market requirements, processes, and rules - has not kept pace with the changes in the ICT environment. In the last five years, the problems presented by this unordered state have become increasingly apparent, and there have been significant efforts mounted to regularize and describe these problems so that solutions can be found. Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in SSOs is one of the central problems. This paper looks at the evolution of SSOs and how this evolution contributed to the current set of problems in IPR regimes among the various types of SSOs. It offers a structural, rather than legal, response to this problem.