Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) policy of WiMax forum

The relationship between standards and IPRs has been more tenses in this decade than ever, IPR has evolved from mere protection to strategically important assets, to avoid standard hijacking such as witnessed with the GSM standard, many standardization body adopts one form of IPR policy or other to ameliorate the problems that arises from the IPRs and standards conflicts. The Wimax forum Intellectual property Rights policy is along the listed guidelines:


PUBLIC DISCLOSURE GUIDELINES:

This specifies that members shall not, without the prior authorization of the WiMAX Forum, publicly disclose other information or materials of the WiMAX Forum except for information and materials that are already generally known or available to the public or are clearly intended for public release, such as approved marketing and promotional materials.

PATENT DISCLOSURE STANDARDS:

All individuals participating in any way in a particular Working Group are strongly encouraged on an ongoing basis to disclose patents or patent applications held by themselves or their represented Members where such patents or patent applications include claims that may be necessary to implement a Draft Specification or a Specification (as such terms are defined under this Policy) that is generated, developed, reviewed or revised by such Working Group. More specifically, individual representatives of members are encouraged to disclose patents containing “Necessary Claims,” where “Necessary Claims” refers to those claims of any and/or all patents and patent applications, throughout the world where a Member or its Affiliates has the right to grant licenses under such claims of the nature agreed to be granted herein without such grant resulting in payment of royalties or other consideration to third parties; and such claims would necessarily be infringed by fully compliant implementation of such Specification or Draft Specification, as applicable. Moreover members and participants are encouraged to provide the most complete information possible concerning the patents and/or patent applications, and to indicate briefly how they may apply to the relevant Specification or Draft Specification When disclosing patents and/or patent applications pursuant to this Policy

LICENSING OF MEMBER INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS:

This policy specifies that, each Member, in the WiMAX Forum, will grant to other Members, their Affiliates and any implementers of the Specification, a nonexclusive, nontransferable worldwide license under its Necessary Claims to allow such Members, their Affiliates and implementers to make, have made, use, import, offer to sell, and sell and otherwise distribute implementations compliant with all relevant required portions of such Specification under reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms and that each Member a will not transfer, and has not transferred, patents having Necessary Claims for the purpose of circumventing this policy.

SPECIFICATION NOTICE, REVIEW AND MEMBER WITHDRAWAL:

This section provides guidelines for member’s full or partial withdrawal from the forum and how reviews and specification report are disseminated