History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Eric J. Iversen
The STEP-Group
Oslo
Norway
e-mail: ericiv@step.no
Patenting and voluntary standards: the tension between the domain of proprietary assets and that of "public goods" in the innovation of new network technologies
Patent regimes and standards development organizations (SDOs) are two institutions that serve to package current knowledge in such a way as to encourage a ‘virtuous circle’ of its production and distribution. Both codify current technical knowledge in detailed and unambiguous terms and in this sense facilitate its commodification. Although different in the two cases, this codification allows the described knowledge of how to do something in technical terms to be sold or otherwise exchanged.
In this respect, patent regimes and SDOs play roles that are essentially complementary in the innovation infrastructure. However, this complementarity is belied by significant tensions emerging from the fact that, in the one case, the resulting document describes a private right (patent) while the other arguably describes a ‘public good’(a standard). The interplay between patenting and standardization has proven especially controversial in the field of information and communication technologies, where the codified knowledge found in patents has come into conflict with that found in voluntary standards.
This paper explores this area of controversy, which pits the domain of proprietary assets against that of "public goods". It investigates the respective roles patent regimes and SDOs play as institutions of commodification, describes the scope for conflict and analyzes a case of conflict. This case involves the standardization of GSM telephony in Europe.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006