Tag Archives: Michael Fröhlich

UN’s International Telecommunications Union holds patent summit in Geneva on Oct. 10, 2012

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) patent summit being held today (Oct. 10, 2012) in Geneva, Switzerland was announced in July 2012 as noted in this July 6, 2012 news item on the BBC News website,

A rash of patent lawsuits has prompted the UN to call smartphone makers and others mobile industry bodies together.

It said the parties needed to address the “innovation-stifling use of intellectual property” which had led to several devices being banned from sale.

It said innovations deemed essential to industry standards, such as 3G or Jpeg photos, would be the meeting’s focus.

It noted that if just one patent holder demanded unreasonable compensation the cost of a device could “skyrocket”.

Microsoft and Apple are among firms that have called on others not to enforce sales bans on the basis of such standards-essential patents.

However, lawyers have noted that doing so would deprive other companies of way to counter-attacking other types of patent lawsuits pursued by the two companies.

Here’s a sample of the activity that has led to convening this summit (excerpted from the BBC news item),

“We are seeing an unwelcome trend in today’s marketplace to use standards-essential patents to block markets,” said the ITU secretary general Dr Hamadoun Toure.

Motorola Mobility – now owned by Google – managed to impose a brief sales ban of iPhone and iPads in Germany last year after Apple refused to pay it a licence fee. The dispute centred on a patent deemed crucial to the GPRS data transmission standard used by GSM cellular networks.

Samsung has also attempted to use its 3G patents to bar Apple from selling products in Europe, Japan and the US.

However, industry watchers note that Apple has used lawsuits to ban Samsung products in both the US and Australia and attempted to restrict sales of other companies’ devices powered by Android.

Mike Masnick commented briefly about the summit in his July 12, 2012 posting on Techdirt,

The UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) — the same unit looking at very questionable plans concerning taxing the internet — has apparently decided that it also needs to step in over the massive patent thicket around smartphones. It’s convening a summit … it looks like they’re only inviting the big companies who make products, and leaving the many trolls out of it. Also, it’s unclear from the description if the ITU really grasps the root causes of the problem: the system itself. …

There’s more information on the ITU summit or patent roundtable webpage,

This Roundtable will assess the effectiveness of RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) – based patent policies. The purpose of this initiative is to provide a neutral venue for industry, standards bodies and regulators to exchange innovative ideas that can guide future discussions on whether current patent policies and existing industry practices adequately respond to the needs of the various stakeholders.

I was particularly interested in the speakers from industry (from the Patent Roundtable programme/agenda),

Segment 1 (Part II: Specific perspectives of certain key stakeholders in “360 view” format):

Moderator: Mr. Knut Blind, Rotterdam School of Management [ Biography ]

Perspectives from certain key stakeholders:

  • Standard Development Organizations:
    Mr. Antoine Dore, ITU
    [ Biography ]
    Mr. Dirk Weiler, ETSI
    [ Biography ]
  • Industry players:
    Mr. BJ Watrous, Apple
    [ Biography ]
    Mr. Ray Warren, Motorola Mobility
    [ Biography ]
    Mr. Michael Fröhlich, RIM [emphasis mine]
    [ Biography ]
  • Patent offices:
    Mr. Michel Goudelis, European Patent Office
    [ Biography ]
    Mr. Stuart Graham, United States Patent and Trademark Office
    [ Biography ]
  • Academic Institution:
    Mr. Tim Pohlmann, Technical University of Berlin

I was surprised to note the presence of a Canadian company at the summit.

In general, hopes do not seem high that anything will be resolved putting me in mind of Middle Eastern peace talks, which have stretched on for decades with no immediate end in sight. We’ll see.