FRAND

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As FRAND (for English: Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory translated: fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory ) are licensing terms for patents and similar broad exclusion rights refer to operations where the proprietor of the users of standards obtained in a gentle way fees that the Acceptance of the standard is not unnecessarily jeopardized. One could also speak of standards with uniform fee regulations or, to put it simply, payment standards. The licensing procedure, which is usually carried out individually, is thus generalized in a form that actually allows the procedure to run like an order for goods and thus makes it both manageable and predictable for the licensee. Graduations according to application area or number of pieces are possible.

practice

A standard that is available against payment of predictable and uniform fees allows its users to enter a competition in which all applicants find comparable starting conditions on the license issue. The pre-determined fee regulation means that all participants are protected against later, incalculable claims. Of course, this security cannot extend to elements whose assignment to exclusion rights was not known at the time the standard was created. For example, some users of the data compression methods LZW ( GIF ) and JPEG were subsequently attacked with patents.

Terms and Criticism

Conceptually, there is also the variant RAND without F for fair , i.e. Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (RAND). There are also differentiations such as RAND-Z ( RAND with zero royalty ) or RAND-RF ( RAND Royalty Free ).

The choice of words for the concept is not without controversy, as it conveys things that are far from being implemented in practice as universally as it initially appears:

  • Reasonable does not have to mean that the license fee has to be in any reasonable relation to the planned product. Cases are conceivable in which a standard for expensive medical devices has been developed and the fees per unit are correspondingly high. Even if there are new use cases, e.g. B. for an electronic device of the mass market, it does not necessarily mean that the previously published license conditions would ever have to be adapted.
  • Discrimination-free (non-discriminatory) does not mean that all business models can live with the license. In the case of information goods (software) in particular, individual items are not necessarily manufactured and billed. Developers of individual software, shareware and free software are often unable to obtain the necessary licenses on - from their point of view - reasonable conditions and are nevertheless discriminated in a certain way.

Since, from the point of view of many market participants, fair and non-discriminatory standards are often neither fair nor non-discriminatory, there are voices who reject the term RAND as a euphemism and therefore suggest that standards under uniform fee only (UFO for short) should be adopted instead speak.

Efforts are therefore also being made to define the term open standards , at least in the area of ​​electronic government traffic and public software procurement, in such a way that it excludes standards that are subject to charges.

Examples

The model of the uniform fee regulation is firmly established with mobile radio standards and in some cases (e.g. with GSM and UMTS ) quite successful. Several manufacturers are competing here to develop and manufacture terminals and switching nodes. This is possible because existing patent thickets have been overcome by a fee system in which all manufacturers are granted access to the market in return for relatively low fees. With some other standards, such as CDMA2000 , however, individual patent holders exercise very extensive control.

In contrast to the GSM area, the World Wide Web Consortium has decided not to allow any fee regulations for future web standards. This means that patented processes cannot be included in web standards or can only be included if the patent holder agrees to grant free licenses. According to the W3C patent policy, the license can be restricted to implementations of the respective standard and the parts of the patent that are required for the respective standard.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Current Patent Practice ( English ) w3.org. Retrieved April 4, 2019.