Research On Patent Rights In Technical Standards

Technical standard is one kind of or one series of mandatory or instructional documents, containing the details of the technical requirements and related technical specifications. Its purpose is to make related products or services meet certain safety standards or demands of market access.However, patent is one of the objects of the intellectual property rights. Its essence is an exclusive right granted by national competent authorities in accordance with law to the inventor or the designer for their creative intellectual results.From the traditional concepts,there is no necessary connection between patent and technical standard, because the standard is open and universally applicable. During the standard-setting process, whether it can be promoted to use universally had been most taken into consideration. It has a public nature. However, patent is a private and exclusive right.If a non-rights holder wants to exercise this right, he has to be licensed and pay license fees. That's why it is private. The early standard-setting organizations tried as possibly as they could to avoid the patented technology into the technical standards in order to prevent patent infringement and to reduce the cost to promote the standards. However, since 1990s, the information technology has been changing with each passing day. High-tech researchers are increasingly focusing on the protection of their intellectual results.Many technical achievements have been covered by the patents.Standard-setting organizations can no longer avoid the patent in the development of technical standards.Coupled with the pursuit of best interest, many multinational companies has created the enterprise standardization strategy with similar content-"patent technology, standardize patent, monopolizing through standards".They actively promote patents of their own into standards or becoming standards,which further accelerates and expands the combining speed and scale between patent and standard. However, whether from the view of history, economics, sociology or jurisprudence, patents in technical standards should remain protected. The original patentability does not thereby lose.Patents integrating into technical standards aims to encourage technological innovation, reduce product and transaction costs, protect the interests of consumers and create a favorable environment for market competition and trade order. However, the patent itself has exclusive and monopolistic characteristics.Through the implementation of standards, in particular de jure standards, patentees are naturally given a de facto market dominance. In order to pursue the maximization of benefits, patentees are prone to abuse the patents in technical standards both in the standard-setting process and the implementation process, for example, not disclosing related patent information, tying, using patent pools to monopolize, and so on. How to deal with these abuses has become a top priority. Directed towards different abuse behaviors, this thesis carries out discussions in depth from the aspects of patent law, antitrust law, contract law, licensing rules, and patent policy of standard-setting organizations.During the development of standardization, developed countries have a early start, a strong sense and a more powerful force, while China's is still at the initial stage. Before we form an official standardization strategy and fully improve it, it is necessary to discuss several important legal issues in this thesis.