Standards Best Practices Blog

One of the important organizational policy documents required for every standards organization, right up there with the organization’s bylaws or charter, the membership agreement, and the committee process is the patent or intellectual property rights policy.  This document defines how the organization will handle the IP rights associated with the technical work carried out by the organization, including the requirements of participants declaring what IP they own in the topic, what licenses must be granted to implementors by participant owners, and how these policies are enforced.

The importance of having a well-crafted IPR policy is proven by the recent Rambus case where the U.S. Court of Appeals found that the ill-defined IPR policy and process at the JEDEC consortium led to participants not knowing what was required of them, leaving a situation open to gaming.

Does your organization want to be caught in the middle of a situation like the Rambus case?

As important as the need for a good IPR policy is, this isn’t a topic for the faint of heart. There’s quite a lot to be considered when putting together such an IPR policy for an organization, viewpoints and interests to be taken into account, details to be worked out, decisions to be made, and — gulp — legal counsel to be consulted.

Of course an easy solution, as is the case for many things in life, is to just copy what others have done. But while imitation may be a form a flattery it isn’t always wise as the circumstances for various organizations will differ. That’s not to say that others’ experiences shouldn’t be taken into account, but it does mean that while an existing policy could be taken as a starting point the policy must still be customized for your organization’s specific needs.

A recent publication by the American Bar Association provides an excellent resource for a standards organization looking at developing (or updating) their IPR policy. Published earlier this year is the Standards Development Patent Policy Manual, created by the ABA’s Committee on Technical Standardization and edited by Jorge Contreras. The book is available at www.ababooks.org. It’s a bit pricey at $60 for a short paperback, but has some very useful content. A brief introduction discusses the issues, then sections provide sample text (with options and commentary) for an organizational IPR policy.

In the December 2007 issue of Discover Magazine I read an interview with Hans Roling, a Professor of International Health and inventor of the Trendalyzer software program used to analyze trends in statistical data, which Roling uses to come up with solutions for international poverty and health issues. I’d like to quote one question and answer from the interview:

“Statistics from the U.N. and government agencies are readily available for purchase, but you argue strongly for dropping fees completely. Why is this so important?

Public statistics are owned by taxpayers. These data, which cost about $10 billion in tax money to collect, belong to everyone. And governments are selling them. The World Bank gets statistics for free from the world. They put them together and sell them back to the world for $275 per copy. This hampers entrepreneurs, activists, and politicians from getting access to public statistics. The money is not the only cost: It is cumbersome to pay, it takes time to get the data, and you are not allowed to make the data available to others. Businesses realize that statistics should be free. And there is is very strong support from middle-income countries — China, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico. They desperately need statistics because their countries are changing so rapidly and they want to trade. Their entrepreneurs can’t afford to pay for data.”

OK, what does this have to do with standards? Roling isn’t talking about standards at all, but the points he’s making about statistical data is exactly what I’ve said before about standards: they should be free. Re-read the above response but substitute “standards” for “data” and “statistics,” and “standards organizations” for “governments” and “World Bank.”

I’m not necessarily advocating that everything should be free; for example, pirated music downloads deprive musicians of compensation for their work. But standards have already been paid for through the work of volunteer participants who developed the standard; their employers paid for their participation because of the benefits to the company or industry in general once the standard is adopted. Where the standards organization adds value it should be compensated, and there are a variety of ways that the organization can add value such as by providing educational or certification activities. But putting a price on obtaining standards inhibits their adoption, and a standard that is not adopted is wasted cost and effort. Additionally, adoption of standards by small businesses and by middle- and low-income countries has a societal benefit in that standards can help them grow; putting a price on purchasing standards can discourage their use.

My son pointed me to a post on the usually entertaining FakeSteve blog criticizing Google’s new Open Handset Alliance. The author quotes the WSJ article on the endevor, which says “Tech consortia for decades have been notorious for failing to live up to their promise.” It’s the “failure of consortia” that caught my eye.

Before I go off on a rant we should be clear that Mr. Fake and the WSJ are talking about product consotia, not standards consortia.  It may be true that product consortia haven’t been terrible effective, but let’s not get that confused with standards consortia, upon which Apple’s (and any other vendor’s) life depends. Given a moment’s thought that should be clear, but I’m afraid that many people will see the word “consortia” and automatically assume that all types are included in the criticism, including many that are successful.

Successful products do tend to be developed by single companies. Laptop computers, automobiles, refrigerators, etc. are all developed and built by companies. Windows and MacOS were developed by companies. But then again Linux was developed by a cooperative effort (we could call it a loose consortia, I guess); time will tell which is most successful.

We shouldn’t forget, though, that any of those products are possible only because of the agreed-upon standards developed by various standards consortia. No, you don’t need a consortium to develop a single product (FakeSteve’s refrigerator example), but think of the number of standards that are used when building the fridge, from the 110v AC household current used to run the thing all the way up to the physical size of the box that fits into a standard cabinet opening.

And just how many standards do you think went into the iPhone? The mobile phone industry would be impossible without standards, most particularly for the standards such as GSM and GPRS used for transmission (and many more; see the Wikipedia article), all of which were developed by consortia. Any time you have two or more dissimilar products communicating with each other there’s going to be a standard required. And that’s only the cell phone part of the iPhone; think about the music player (MP3s, etc.) and other functions.

So let’s not paint all consortia with the same broad brush; some are successful and others not. I can’t speak much about product consortia, but I can say that standards consortia (and other standards organizations) are very successful.

While working this morning on my Resources page, I was reminded again of a topic that I feel quite strongly about and have spoken of on a number of occasions: the need to communicate about standards activities. By this I mean the need for standards organizations to publish, in a consistent and preferably central manner, the status of activities that they are working on and the results of that work.

Why is this important?  The nature of standards, that they are an agreement on how things should be done, implies that the standard needs be communicated. If everyone is supposed to do things in the same way, how are they supposed to do so if they don’t know what that way is? A secret standard defeats the purpose of standardization. Whether the use of the standard is voluntary or mandated, if a user or implementor doesn’t know about the standard then they won’t use it.

Further, by publishing information about work being done the standards organizations will prevent duplication of effort, increase participation, and decrease market confusion. Given the means to find out what work exists a person or company needing a standard solution to a particular problem can look for existing answers rather than starting a new effort, join and participate in an existing activity, or adopt an existing standard. While there is sometimes value in having different solutions to a particular problem, too many solutions requires a lot of duplication of effort, spreads resources thin, and defeats the advantages of having a standard.

The problem begins with the number of organizations that develop standards. There are hundreds, if not thousands, in the world today. Lists of standards organizations may be found at at ANSI, CEN, SES, WSSN, and ConsortiumInfo.org. And those are mostly just the U.S.-based and international level organizations; I’m sure that there are a lot more. Then consider the number of standards completed by or in progress at these organizations.

Most organizations are fairly good about publishing the results of their work; they have, individually, interests in seeing their standards adopted. But given the huge number of organizations, how does one go about finding a standards that meets his needs? This is compounded by the problem that each organization publishes their work in a different format; every web page is in a different format and requires a different set of mouse clicks to find the desired information.

So I’ve been suggesting for some time the idea of having a single database, or at the very least a set of linked databases, that will contain standardized (what a concept) information about every standard developed, or in development, by every standards organization. A person interested in finding a standard solution for a particular problem or topic can perform a single search to find all of the standards completed or in development in that area. Everyone that I’ve suggested this idea to over the past few years has thought that it was a great idea, but no one thought enough of it that they wanted to fund the effort. That seems to be the biggest problem: funding. The solution would require hosting for a web site and database, and salaries for the people involved in gathering, entering, and maintaining the information. CEN had embarked on just such a project a few years ago, but the funding ran out after a couple of years so the project was shelved. ANSI has an ongoing effort with their NSSN database but it appears to be mostly a front end to their e-store for purchasing standards.

A  possible alternative is for each organization to enter and maintain their own information. But getting standards organizations to work together, however noble the goal, is worse than herding cats. I’ve tried suggesting this, but the organizations I talked to insisted that they were just fine publishing their own information in their own way, i.e. in a manner different than their peers.

So, does anyone else feel strongly about this topic? Strongly enough to fund such an effort? Please step forward.