Emerging ways to address the re-emerging conflict between patenting and technological standardization.

Abstract

The relationship between standards and intellectual property rights (IPRs) is a complementary but troubled one. The way it is managed affects the way stakeholders contribute to standards and may ultimately affect the way some technologies and even industries evolve. A spate of recent legal controversies has been accompanied by the emergence of new mechanisms to help govern the risk of conflict here. This article provides an empirical analysis of these attempts to reconcile the aims of these regimes.