Update on the antitrust ghost in the standard-setting machine [patents]

This article presents Richard Stern\´s Micro Law paper in the May-June 2005 issue of IEEE Micro, by two lawyers involved in presenting Hewlett-Packard\´s RAND proposal to the IEEE PatCom recently. The paper captured the essence of a long-running obstacle to addressing the anticompetitive patent "hold-up" that undermines the open-standards objectives of standards developing organizations (SDOs). That obstacle is the misconceived fear of antitrust liability if an SDO allows any consideration of license intentions beyond vague or vacuous commitments to reasonable and nondiscriminatory (RAND) licensing during the course of a standard-setting process.