The legal granting of intellectual property rights (IPR) to their creators has long been seen as a contract of mutual benefit to the creators and society at large. In short, society gives a legal right to the exclusive exploitation of the creative content or idea for a period of time, in return for knowing about it. This contrasts with ‘trade secrets’ where there is no legal protection, and society remains unaware of the details of the innovation. Economists recognise that the granting of intellectual property rights gives a strong motivation for individuals and organisations to innovate for the benefit of all, promoting what they call ‘dynamic efficiency’.
However, the exclusive right to exploit an idea can sit at odds with the aims of standards to allow interoperability between many players all implementing the same idea. As a result, standards bodies are also concerned with intellectual property rights and how to ‘get the best of both worlds’.
Since the late 1980s, as telecoms generally evolved from state owned utilities to commercial enterprises, every telecommunications standards body has had a policy on intellectual property. The details for each body do vary, so it is important to check the details if this is of concern.
Most bodies work to a FRAND principle, that an individual or organisation participating in the standard bodies, and owning any intellectual property on which a standard might depend, must make it available on ‘fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory’ terms. Indeed, signing the IPR agreement is normally a prerequisite to joining and participating in a standards body.
Serious issues on IPR can be the death of a standard, or at best can seriously delay a standard, and so standards bodies are diligent on tracking IPR and access to it.
Equally, operating within these FRAND terms has allowed many organisations to make a good return on their intellectual property. Standards themselves are normally copyright. However they are done, standards are expensive to agree and produce, and the final specification (and even earlier drafts) are of considerable value. Generally, standards bodies retain the copyright to all their specifications, even if they make them available for download at no change.
Open-source software is a particular example of a document (normally software source code) with a copyright licence with particular conditions. This is typically specified the front of every file containing code (normally in comment form so the file can still be successfully compiled). There are many open-source software licences which broadly fall into two categories:
- Permissive licences - these allow the code to be used in such a way that it can be incorporated into proprietary systems. In general, participants in the open-source project make all their contributions available under the open-source licence but when they use the final code, they can freely add to it without making these additions available. Examples include the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) licences, the MIT licences, and the Apache licences.
- Copyleft licences - these are more restrictive, with the licence requiring that any modifications to the code covered by the licence must be made available under the same licence, thus maintaining the openness of derivative code. Examples include the GNU Public Licence (GPL) and the Mozilla Public Licence (MPL).
