Standard Setting Organization and Standard Patent on The U.S. Antitrust Law

• Main Authors: Jeff C. Lee, 李兆國
• Other Authors: Shang-Jyh Liu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2003
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/05618553862585067349

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 科技法律研究所 === 91 === Information technology has sparked the development of many new products. Most of such products have trended toward to standardization, especially on products related to Internet applications, since the effect upon “Network Effect” in recently years. Standardization make many advantages and convenient to most vendors and users, but also generate some disputes named Standard Patent Infringement. These standard patent owners can exclude others to import, sell, offer to sell and make products that complied with such standard. Once the standard patent is an essential or basic patent in perform standard, no one can produce a standard product without patent infringing. Even the standard patent owner did not monopolize the standard product market, it own the market power in technology market and easy to exclude competitors in relevant product market. Some standard patent disputes arise from improper behavior by the patent owner during or after the standard setting procedure. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) treated these problems as patent owners disobey antitrust law, like 1996 Dell Computer Corporation was complained by FTC and finally give up to enforce the related patent right, Rambus Inc. also was complained by FTC in 2002 because Rambus’s didn’t disclose its patent information to the SDRAM standard-setting organization and its members and intent to dominate the technology market. This Article evaluates and discusses the problems related to Standard-Setting Organization (SSO) and its members who own the standard patents, including the SSO’s policy and bylaw, the limitation of standard patent right and validity of standard patents, standard patent misuse and refusal to licensing. I provide some suggestions in this Article to prevent SSO’s members misleading or capturing standard patents: 1. All SSO’s members join the standard setting task shall disclose their patent information completely, neither published nor unpublished patents can be concealed. 2. SSO’s reasonable and non-discriminatory license requirements to standard patent owners shall be clearly and well defined, in order to enforce such policy by SSO and execute the licensing promise made by patent owner during the standard-setting period, that promise will be decided as a legal estoppel in court. 3. Standard-setting procedures and processes should be more open and transparent, and the discussing materials should be disclosed time to time. 4. Stand Patents will impede the standardization, SSO should try to select an open standard but avoid its fragmentation. Moreover, Antitrust Law should be using to prohibit unfair competition that patent owners join the SSO and then capture the standard patent by any conducts in bad faith. The court should admit that conceal patent information during standard-setting period is one kind of fraud and its purpose is intent to monopoly according to Antitrust Law.