Rethinking RAND: SDO-Based Approaches to Patent Licensing Commitments

Jorge Contreras, American University - Washington College of Law

10/10/2012
(Original Publish Date: 10/10/2012)

So-called "reasonable and nondiscriminatory" (RAND) licensing commitments have been utilized by standards-development organizations (SDOs) for years in an attempt to alleviate the risk of patent hold-up in standard-setting. These commitments, however, have proven to be vague and offer few assurances to product vendors or patent holders. A recent surge of international litigation concerning RAND commitments has brought this issue to the attention of regulators, industry and the public, and many agree that a better approach is needed. In this paper, I identify seven "first principles" that underlie the licensing and enforcement of standards-essential patents (SEP)s. These can be summarized as follows: (1) certainty is preferable to uncertainty concerning the cost of implementing a technical standard, (2) there is a meaningful upper limit on reasonable royalty rates, (3) information regarding RAND terms should be available before adoption of a standard, (4) individual RAND commitments must be constrained by the aggregate royalty burden on a standard, (5) non-SEPs need not be bundled with SEPs, (6) SEPs should not be used to block implementation of a standard unless the recovery of monetary compensation is impossible, and (7) RAND commitments should travel with the relevant patent.