On Monday, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the world's largest professional organisation for the advancement of technology, will announce a collaboration with Via Licensing, a company that administers licensing programs for intellectual-property owners, to foster the development of patent pools based on IEEE standards.
IEEE and Via representatives have said the collaboration is the first of its kind between a standards developer and a licensing administrator.
The two-year pilot programme will encourage intellectual-property (IP) holders to establish joint licensing programmes through which they can offer streamlined royalty rates and licences for all of the patents in the pool.
"What it means if you're an implementer is that you have a one-stop shop to get all the licences you need to develop a product," said Edward Rashba, director of new business ventures for IEEE.
IEEE entered into the agreement with the goal of getting more products based on its standards out onto the market, Rashba said. Via, for its part, will apply its normal administration fees to any patent pools arranged with IEEE. The specific terms of the deal are confidential, though both entities will take on some costs of the project, and a small percentage of Via's returns will flow back to IEEE.
"What we've been hearing from our members is the need to... help implement standards on the marketplace... and getting these pools together will be a very powerful approach to make these products more successful," Rashba said. "We feel we have the opportunity to address some of the key challenges facing the technology industry."
Those challenges include navigating overlapping IP rights, dealing with multiple IP holders and different prices, and the increasing risk of costly patent lawsuits. Uncertainties surrounding licensing can delay products from going to market.
These problems have spurred varying solutions, like the 'defensive patent aggregator' business model adopted by RPX, a new company that buys up patents with the intent of providing them to their member companies, which pay an annual fee of anywhere between $35,000 (£24,000) and $4.9m for RPX's services.
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Patent pooling is a fairy uncommon way around the maze of licensing complications: there are only about a dozen high-profile patent pools, eight of which are administered by Via, according to Jason Johnson, Via's vice president of marketing and business development. Via, a Dolby subsidiary, is currently developing an ultra-high frequency RFID patent pool for members of the RFID Consortium.
While Via will facilitate negotiations with participating companies, the IEEE's role is "building awareness", Rashba said.
Johnson said it is hard to anticipate how successful the programme will be, since developing a patent pool can take one to two years.
"If we get one formed at the end of two years, I think everyone will be excited," Rashba said.
