Patent Technology Standardization Conflicts Of Interest And Balance

Technical standards refer to rules, which have mandatory requirements or instructions with certain features, and contain detailed technical requirements or technical program aiming to make the relevant product or service reach a certain industry requirements in the market. They have significant strong social and public properties. Nevertheless, the patent is a legal monopoly of private properties. Therefore, they suffer an internal conflict, namely a conflict between the public and private benefits, due to their different properties mentioned above. With the advert of the knowledge economy era, the core of competition will be the fine control of knowledge and information. So that technical standards and patents will gradually integrate rather than conflict with each other. This will then generate a new way to control the market, and therefore encourage the competition in the market. This, however, would not eliminate the substantial conflict. Specifically, the imbalance benefits of patent holder and standard user would cause further conflicts in the standardization process of the patent technology and the patent holder abuse of patents would undermine orderly market competition as well.Standardization organizations proposed many strategies to undermine the authority abuse in the standardization process of the patent technology in different countries, including information disclosure policy, policy of patent licensing, patent regulation system, antitrust regulations and etc. Those strategies, however, have a common problem that the definition of the authority abuse is ambiguous so that they could not stop the authority abuse efficiently and hence would not balance the benefits between those main parties. The reason is that most of the advanced technical standards could not avoid the integration of the patent technology and the Standardization organizations have no alternatives. Hence, in order to make and carry out the technical standards, the balance has to be tilted to the patent holder. Unfortunately, this would also cause a lot of issues, such as market monopoly and obstacle of technological progress. Therefore, it is necessary to study and solve the problems in the standardization process of the patent technology to pursue a balance between the patent technical standards making process and the patent license in order to reach a final win-win between public and private benefits.The key to solve problems above is to define the patent abuse in the standardization process of the patent technology. In order to protect the patent holder to from harm and at the meantime avoid to violate the interests of the applicants who represent the public benefit, the authority abuse ought to be strongly prohibited and the ambiguous cases should be further investigated. Although the all the nations have patent law and intellectual property policies on standardization organizations, which make certain degree of regulation on patent abuse in the patent technology standardization process, those patent laws can not control the antitrust patented technology standardization conduct effectively due to the limitations of private legal standard; and also intellectual property policy standardization organizations can not effectively regulate those behaviours either due to the fuzziness and lack of coercive power. The antitrust laws, however, can overcome the limitations of private standard patent law and have enforceable regulations.Legal protection of patents for technology standardization is still under construction in China. In this particular case, relevant legal regulations and judicial practice is lack so that it is fairly common that the foreign multinationals could make use our patented technology standard corporate patent infringement complaint or charge exorbitant licensing fees. Therefore, the technical standards should be clearly defined in the patent law, antitrust law and other relevant laws and regulations in our law system. Meanwhile, the development of a specialized technical standards and regulations on patents ought to be accelerated in order to adapt to the new changes in the international competition.