Amid flurry of infringement suits, Open Patent Alliance forges ahead
The tech patent wars are alive and well, most recently with Microsoft going up against Motorola and then Motorola turning on Apple Computer. However, with any amount of luck — and perhaps a little help from the Open Patent Alliance — maybe the mobile ecosystem landscape will grow friendlier as 4G arrives.
The tech patent wars are alive and well, most recently with Microsoft going up against Motorola and then Motorola turning on Apple. However, with any amount of luck — and perhaps a little help from the Open Patent Alliance — maybe the mobile ecosystem landscape will grow friendlier as 4G arrives.
Motorola filed patent infringement actions against Apple this week spanning 18 patents that reportedly cover 3G, Wi-Fi and smartphone technologies. The week prior, Motorola landed on the receiving end of a Microsoft suit, filed for the infringement of nine Microsoft patents by Motorola’s Android-based smartphones.
Apple iPhoneys: The 4G edition
These are just the latest actions, and it’s a challenge to keep them straight. While companies certainly are entitled to fiercely protect their intellectual property, the level of activity in this industry makes you wonder if mobile ecosystem companies are in the business of wireless communications or litigation. Does it really matter? Well, yeah, a little: all the ecosystem infighting slows down delivery of goods and services, and some chunk of the legal and patent licensing fees gets passed to us.
Here’s hoping that an organization called The Open Patent Alliance can help ease these issues as 4G comes into focus. The now 11-company group began analyzing potential barriers to the 4G device landscape about four years ago and settled on the patent issue as a potential show stopper. The organization anticipated that three ecosystems — wireless networking, consumer electronics and PCs — would have to work together to make 4G happen.
And historically, each has handled patent issues differently, says Yung Hahn, president of the OPA and a wireless strategy and ecosystem director at Intel, one of the OPA’s founding members. So the organization began a year ago to establish a patent pool and best practices for 4G.
The OPA’s vision of the patent pool involves getting 50% or more of companies with patents related to a given 4G technology to agree to throw the technology into a licensing pool, so that “the law of the majority is on its side,” Hahn says. From there, they negotiate a communal rate for a patent license that is published so that others know the rate up front and can also pay the same rate for a license.
Such a process differs from the traditional wireless bilateral licensing deals for which usually “the terms were not disclosed,” preventing fair and reasonable patent license fees from being easily determined.
The OPA started with WiMAX a year ago, because that was the first 4G technology available and coming to market. Hahn says that nearly 50% of WiMAX patents are accounted for in the 20-plus suppliers that have signed agreements to participate in the OPA’s WiMAX patent pool, which he expects to be complete in December or January.
On the LTE front, the OPA is working on coalescing three efforts already underway by companies that build patent pools for a living, Hahn says.
Members of the OPA include Acer, Alvarion, Beceem, Cisco, Clearwire, GCT, Huawei, Intel, Samsung, Sequans and UQ WiMAX.
