Digital Standards Organization

Knowledge Ecology International adds a proposal concerning open standards to submission for the WIPO Standing Committee on Patents 13th session. Their proposal could provide a solution for standards organisations such as ISO.

Attachment – Part 6.1 and 6.2 of May 10, 2005 Draft proposal for a Treaty on Access to Knowledge
Part 6 - Promotion of Open Standards
Article 6-1 - Committee on Open Standards
A committee on open standards (COS) shall be established.
Article 6-2 - Disclosure obligations for patents relating to standards development organizations.
(a) The COS shall establish a process and criteria for a Standards Development Organization
(SDO) to request a managed disclosure of relevant patent claims for standards relevant to a
knowledge good or service. To make such a request, the SDO must be global, with a
membership that is open to any party, and the qualifying open standard must:
VERSION 1
i. be adopted and maintained by a not-for-profit organization, and with ongoing
development based upon an open decision-making procedure available to all interested
parties (consensus or majority decision);
ii. be published, with the specification of the standard available either freely or at a nominal
charge, with permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a nominal fee;
and
iii. the intellectual property aspects of the standard, including the relevant patents or data,
shall be made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis; and
iv. there are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.
VERSION 2
i. be published without restriction (e.g., potential implementers are not restricted from
accessing the standard) in electronic or tangible form, and in sufficient detail to enable a
complete understanding of the standard’s scope and purpose;
ii. be publicly available without cost or for a reasonable non-discriminatory fee for adoption
and implementation by any interested party;
iii. Any patent or data rights necessary to implement the standards are made available by
those developing the specification to all implementers on reasonable and nondiscriminatory
(RAND) terms (either with or without payment of a reasonable royalty or
fee); and
iv. The process to develop, maintain, approve, or ratify the standard is by consensus, in a
market-driven standards-setting organization that is open to all interested and qualified
participants.
(b) The request for a managed disclosure process shall include the following:
i. A description of the SDO
ii. An initial specification of the standard, including the expected applications for the
standard,
iii. The benefits to the public of the development of the standard,
iv. Disclosures of patents relevant to the proposed standard that are not responsive to the
requirements to be specific with regard to the relevance of the patent to the proposed
standard shall be rejected.
(c) Members agree that a patent holder that fails to make constructive disclosures of relevant
patent claims will be prevented from enforcing the patent against the implementation of the
open standard.