How IPR Policies of Telecommunication Standard-Setting Organizations Can Effectively Address the Patent Ambush Problem?

The conflicts between intellectual property rights (IPRs) and industry common standards in telecommunication sector have raised growing concerns in the industry. These highly controversial issues at play include the embrace of proprietary technologies in standards, excessive royalties for the use of proprietary technologies, the refusal to grant licenses for the use of proprietary technologies. Many standard-setting organizations (SSOs) have adopted IPR policies in order to address these issues. However, some legal disputes concerning such IPR policies have been raised in recent years, showing that the IPR issues in standardization are far from settled. This article examines the IPR policies of three major telecommunication SSOs under the EU and U.S. law, and concludes that some flaws of these IPR policies may make them fail to address the problems that they have tended to address, and finally it will provide some ways to fix those problems. The first part of this article provides a background of the standardization of mobile telecommunication technologies and the development of IPR policies by three major telecommunication SSOs. The second examines the requirement of disclosure of essential IPRs in SSO IPR policies. The third part examines the requirement of fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) licensing commitments in SSO IPR policies. Part four provides the conclusion