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56-484: The Khronos Group, Inc. is an open , non-profit , member-driven consortium of 170 organizations developing, publishing and maintaining royalty-free interoperability standards for 3D graphics , virtual reality , augmented reality , parallel computation , vision acceleration and machine learning . The open standards and associated conformance tests enable software applications and middleware to effectively harness authoring and accelerated playback of dynamic media across

112-528: A "free software and open standards law." The decree includes the requirement that the Venezuelan public sector must use free software based on open standards, and includes a definition of open standard: Reasonable and non-discriminatory Reasonable and non-discriminatory ( RAND ) terms, also known as fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory ( FRAND ) terms, denote a voluntary licensing commitment that standards organizations often request from

168-483: A Khronos API standard must pass conformance tests. An API Adopter Program enables companies to test their products for conformance. Membership in Khronos Group provides access to an IP framework designed to protect participant IP. Khronos members agree not to assert IP rights against adopters implementing Khronos specifications. The IP framework protects Khronos members from exposure to patent lawsuits and reduces

224-681: A common patent policy under the banner of the WSC . However, the ITU-T definition should not necessarily be considered also applicable in ITU-R, ISO and IEC contexts, since the Common Patent Policy does not make any reference to "open standards" but rather only to "standards." In section 7 of its RFC 2026, the IETF classifies specifications that have been developed in a manner similar to that of

280-402: A data format which is made public, is thoroughly documented and neutral with regard to the technological tools needed to peruse the same data. The E-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF) defines open standard as royalty-free according to the following text: While a universally agreed definition of "open standards" is unlikely to be resolved in the near future, the e-GIF accepts that

336-606: A definition of "open standards" needs to recognise a continuum that ranges from closed to open, and encompasses varying degrees of "openness." To guide readers in this respect, the e-GIF endorses "open standards" that exhibit the following properties: The e-GIF performs the same function in e-government as the Road Code does on the highways. Driving would be excessively costly, inefficient, and ineffective if road rules had to be agreed each time one vehicle encountered another. The Portuguese Open Standards Law, adopted in 2011, demands

392-535: A definition of open standards, which also is used in pan-European software development projects. It states: The French Parliament approved a definition of "open standard" in its "Law for Confidence in the Digital Economy." The definition is (Article 4): A clear royalty-free stance and far reaching requirements case is the one for India's Government 4.1 Mandatory Characteristics An Identified Standard will qualify as an "Open Standard", if it meets

448-605: A full, irrevocable and irreversible way to the Portuguese State; e) There are no restrictions to its implementation. A Law passed by the Spanish Parliament requires that all electronic services provided by the Spanish public administration must be based on open standards. It defines an open standard as royalty-free, according to the following definition (ANEXO Definiciones k): An open standard fulfills

504-400: A license for the products they do want or requiring licensees to take licenses to certain unwanted or unneeded patents to obtain licenses to other desired patents (bundling); requiring licensees to license their own IP to the licensor for free (free grant backs); and including restrictive conditions on licensees' dealings with competitors (mandatory exclusivity). Reasonable refers mainly to

560-400: A license within the first year of its availability. RAND terms exclude intangible goods which the producer may decide to distribute at no cost and where third parties may make further copies. Take for example a software package that is distributed at no cost and to which the developer wants to add support for a video format which requires a patent licence. If there is a licence which requires

616-557: A patent holder clarify its willingness to offer to license its standard-essential patents on FRAND terms. If the patent holder refuses upon request to license a patent that has become essential to a standard, then the standard-setting organization must exclude that technology. When viewed in this light, the FRAND commitment serves to harmonize the private interests of patent holders and the public interests of standard-setting organizations. Many scholars have written about these topics, as well as

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672-421: A patent holder has the option to monetize that invention through exclusive use or exclusive licensing. Technology owners might have insufficient incentives to contribute their technologies to a standard-setting organization without the promise of an adequate royalty. The promise of a F/RAND royalty address that problem: the patent holder will typically agree to contribute its technology to the standard, thus forgoing

728-598: A set of principles which have contributed to the exponential growth of the Internet and related technologies. The "OpenStand Principles" define open standards and establish the building blocks for innovation. Standards developed using the OpenStand principles are developed through an open, participatory process, support interoperability, foster global competition, are voluntarily adopted on a global level and serve as building blocks for products and services targeted to meet

784-435: A standard-setting organization sets a standard that adopts the technology that the patent covers. Because a patent, under most countries' legal regimes, grants its owner an exclusive right to exclude others from making, using, selling, or importing the invention, a standard-setting organization generally must obtain permission from the patent holder to include a patented technology in its standard. So, it will often request that

840-487: A standard—that is, a firm or entity that uses a standard to render a service or manufacture a product—is an intended third-party beneficiary of the FRAND agreement, and, as such, is entitled to certain rights conferred by that agreement. A standard-setting organization is an industry group that sets common standards for its particular industry to ensure compatibility and interoperability of devices manufactured by different companies. A patent becomes standard-essential when

896-500: A tiny per-copy fee, the software project will not be able to avail of the licence. The licence may be called "(F)RAND", but the modalities discriminate against a whole category of intangible goods such as free software and freeware . This form of discrimination can be similarly caused by common licence terms such as only applying to complete implementations of the licensed standard, limiting use to particular fields, or restricting redistribution. The Free Software Foundation suggests

952-685: A variety of other legal and economic issues concerning licensing on F/RAND terms. Standard-setting organizations commonly adopt policies that govern the ownership of patent rights that apply to the standards they adopt (the patent policy). In the United States, the patent holder's agreement to adhere by the patent policy creates a legally binding contract, as the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in Microsoft v. Motorola . One of

1008-492: A wide variety of platforms and devices. The group is based in Beaverton, Oregon . The Khronos Group was founded in 2000 by companies including 3Dlabs , ATI , Discreet , Evans & Sutherland , Intel , SGI , and Sun Microsystems . Promoter members include AMD , Apple , Arm , Epic Games , Google , Huawei , Nokia , Imagination , Intel , NVIDIA , Qualcomm , Samsung , Sony , Valve and Verisilicon. Its president

1064-494: Is Neil Trevett . Typically, Khronos first creates an exploratory group to gauge industry interest before creating a working group, which companies can join as members to assist in the development of the standard. Each specification / standard is managed by a working group which is established to define the requirements, solicit input, discuss, and create a specification. There are currently 16 working groups. A timeline of API Specification ratification and releases can be found on

1120-714: Is determined by the market. The ITU-T is a standards development organization (SDO) that is one of the three sectors of the International Telecommunication Union (a specialized agency of the United Nations ). The ITU-T has a Telecommunication Standardization Bureau director's Ad Hoc group on IPR that produced the following definition in March 2005, which the ITU-T as a whole has endorsed for its purposes since November 2005: The ITU-T , ITU-R , ISO , and IEC have harmonized on

1176-557: Is here meant in the sense of fulfilling the following requirements: The Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) defines open standard as the following: Specifications for hardware and/or software that are publicly available implying that multiple vendors can compete directly based on the features and performance of their products. It also implies that the existing open system can be removed and replaced with that of another vendor with minimal effort and without major interruption. The Danish government has attempted to make

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1232-506: Is then published in the form of RFC 6852 in January 2013. The European Union defined the term for use within its European Interoperability Framework for Pan-European eGovernment Services, Version 1.0 although it does not claim to be a universal definition for all European Union use and documentation. To reach interoperability in the context of pan-European eGovernment services, guidance needs to focus on open standards. The word "open"

1288-759: The GSM phones (adopted as a government standard), Open Group which promotes UNIX , and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) which created the first standards of SMTP and TCP/IP. Buyers tend to prefer open standards which they believe offer them cheaper products and more choice for access due to network effects and increased competition between vendors. Open standards which specify formats are sometimes referred to as open formats . Many specifications that are sometimes referred to as standards are proprietary, and only available (if they can be obtained at all) under restrictive contract terms from

1344-607: The New Zealand , South African and the Venezuelan governments. On the standard organisation side, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ensures that its specifications can be implemented on a royalty-free basis. Many definitions of the term standard permit patent holders to impose " reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing" royalty fees and other licensing terms on implementers or users of

1400-644: The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary that the individual terms are defined as follows: Fair relates mainly to the underlying licensing terms. Drawing from anti-trust/ competition law ; fair terms means terms which are not anti-competitive and that would not be considered unlawful if imposed by a dominant firm in their relative market. Examples of terms that would breach this commitment are: requiring licensees to buy licenses for products that they do not want in order to get

1456-611: The "Simplified BSD License" as stated in the IETF Trust Legal Provisions and Copyright FAQ based on RFC 5377. In August 2012, the IETF combined with the W3C and IEEE to launch OpenStand and to publish The Modern Paradigm for Standards. This captures "the effective and efficient standardization processes that have made the Internet and Web the premiere platforms for innovation and borderless commerce". The declaration

1512-456: The FRAND obligation in their bylaws primarily as a means of enhancing the pro-competitive character of their industry. They are intended to prevent members from engaging in licensing abuse based on the monopolistic advantage generated as a result of having their intellectual property rights (IPR) included in the industry standards. Once an organization is offering a FRAND license they are required to offer that license to anyone (wishing to access

1568-495: The IETF and ITU-T explicitly refer to their standards as "open standards", while the others refer only to producing "standards". The IETF and ITU-T use definitions of "open standard" that allow "reasonable and non-discriminatory" patent licensing fee requirements. There are those in the open-source software community who hold that an "open standard" is only open if it can be freely adopted, implemented and extended. While open standards or architectures are considered non-proprietary in

1624-518: The IETF itself as being "open standards," and lists the standards produced by ANSI , ISO , IEEE , and ITU-T as examples. As the IETF standardization processes and IPR policies have the characteristics listed above by ITU-T, the IETF standards fulfill the ITU-T definition of "open standards." However, the IETF has not adopted a specific definition of "open standard"; both RFC 2026 and the IETF's mission statement (RFC 3935) talks about "open process," but RFC 2026 does not define "open standard" except for

1680-424: The Khronos Group website. Khronos members may contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, vote at various stages before public deployment, and accelerate delivery of their platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. To ensure that the standards are consistently implemented and to create a reliable platform for developers, any product that implements

1736-408: The amount of IP that needs to be licensed from other group members. Open standard The terms open and standard have a wide range of meanings associated with their usage. There are a number of definitions of open standards which emphasize different aspects of openness, including the openness of the resulting specification, the openness of the drafting process, and the ownership of rights in

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1792-649: The degree of openness will be taken into account when selecting an appropriate standard: The UK government 's definition of open standards applies to software interoperability, data and document formats. The criteria for open standards are published in the "Open Standards Principles" policy paper and are as follows. The Cabinet Office in the UK recommends that government departments specify requirements using open standards when undertaking procurement exercises in order to promote interoperability and re-use, and avoid technological lock-in. The Venezuelan Government approved

1848-483: The exclusive use or the exclusive licensing of its technology, in exchange for the assurance that it will receive adequate compensation in reasonable royalties. In 2013, court decisions and scholarly articles cited FRAND commitments 10 times more often than in 2003. While there are no legal precedents to spell out specifically what the actual terms mean, it can be interpreted from the testimony of people like Professor Mark Lemley from Stanford University , in front of

1904-506: The following conditions: The South African Government approved a definition in the "Minimum Interoperability Operating Standards Handbook" (MIOS). For the purposes of the MIOS, a standard shall be considered open if it meets all of these criteria. There are standards which we are obliged to adopt for pragmatic reasons which do not necessarily fully conform to being open in all respects. In such cases, where an open standard does not yet exist,

1960-581: The following criteria: Italy has a general rule for the entire public sector dealing with Open Standards, although concentrating on data formats, in Art. 68 of the Code of the Digital Administration ( Codice dell'Amministrazione Digitale ) [applications must] allow representation of data under different formats, at least one being an open data format. [...] [it is defined] an open data format,

2016-653: The licensing process. The negotiating process for FRAND licenses places requirements on the patent owner and the envisioned patentee. The terms for these negotiations were set in German case law in a case regarding the Orange-Book-Standard , and these terms are often used in licensing negotiations. In 2015, the European Court of Justice interpreted FRAND licensing terms in case Huawei v ZTE (C170/13, ECLI:EU:C:2015:477 significantly diverging from

2072-407: The licensing rates. According to some, a reasonable licensing rate is a rate charged on licenses which would not result in an unreasonable aggregate rate if all licensees were charged a similar rate. According to this view, aggregate rates that would significantly increase the cost to the industry and make the industry uncompetitive are unreasonable. Similarly, a reasonable licensing rate must reward

2128-583: The licensor with adequate compensation for contributing its essential patents to a standard. Compensation is adequate if it provides the licensor with the incentive to continue investing and contributing to the standard in future time periods. A licensor which has several different licensing packages might be tempted to have both reasonable and unreasonable packages. However having a reasonable "bundled" rate does not excuse having unreasonable licensing rates for smaller unbundled packages. All licensing rates must be reasonable. Non-discriminatory relates to both

2184-500: The most common policies is to require a patent holder that voluntarily agrees to include its patented technology in the standard to license that technology on "reasonable and non-discriminatory terms" (RAND) or on "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms" (FRAND). The two terms are generally interchangeable; FRAND seems to be preferred in Europe and RAND in the U.S. Some commentators argue that standard-setting organizations include

2240-400: The needs of markets and consumers. This drives innovation which, in turn, contributes to the creation of new markets and the growth and expansion of existing markets. There are five, key OpenStand Principles, as outlined below: 1. Cooperation Respectful cooperation between standards organizations, whereby each respects the autonomy, integrity, processes, and intellectual property rules of

2296-411: The organization that owns the copyright on the specification. As such these specifications are not considered to be fully open . Joel West has argued that "open" standards are not black and white but have many different levels of "openness". A more open standard tends to occur when the knowledge of the technology becomes dispersed enough that competition is increased and others are able to start copying

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2352-711: The others. 2. Adherence to Principles – Adherence to the five fundamental principles of standards development, namely 3. Collective Empowerment Commitment by affirming standards organizations and their participants to collective empowerment by striving for standards that: 4. Availability Standards specifications are made accessible to all for implementation and deployment. Affirming standards organizations have defined procedures to develop specifications that can be implemented under fair terms. Given market diversity, fair terms may vary from royalty-free to fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms (FRAND). 5. Voluntary Adoption Standards are voluntarily adopted and success

2408-406: The owner of an intellectual property right (usually a patent) that is, or may become, essential to practice a technical standard . Put differently, a F/RAND commitment is a voluntary agreement between the standard-setting organization and the holder of standard-essential patents . U.S. courts, as well as courts in other jurisdictions, have found that, in appropriate circumstances, the implementer of

2464-399: The patent holder should be rewarded accordingly. That is particularly relevant when the value of the patent is not clearly known before the adoption of the standard. Some interpretations of "non-discriminatory" can include time-oriented licensing terms such as an "early bird" license offered by a licensor where terms of a RAND license are better for initial licensees or for licensees who sign

2520-647: The purpose of defining what documents IETF standards can link to. RFC 2026 belongs to a set of RFCs collectively known as BCP 9 (Best Common Practice, an IETF policy). RFC 2026 was later updated by BCP 78 and 79 (among others). As of 2011 BCP 78 is RFC 5378 (Rights Contributors Provide to the IETF Trust), and BCP 79 consists of RFC 3979 (Intellectual Property Rights in IETF Technology) and a clarification in RFC 4879. The changes are intended to be compatible with

2576-470: The same regardless of the licensee. This obligation is included in order to maintain a level playing field with respect to existing competitors and to ensure that potential new entrants are free to enter the market on the same basis. The most controversial issue in RAND licensing is whether the "reasonable" license price should include the value contributed by the standard-setting organization's decision to adopt

2632-485: The sense that the standard is either unowned or owned by a collective body, it can still be publicly shared and not tightly guarded. The typical example of "open source" that has become a standard is the personal computer originated by IBM and now referred to as Wintel , the combination of the Microsoft operating system and Intel microprocessor. There are three others that are most widely accepted as "open" which include

2688-447: The standard will receive royalties from users of the standard that adequately compensate the patent holder for the incremental value that its technology contributes to the standard. The development of a patented technology typically requires significant investment in research, and contributing that technology to a standard is not the only option by which a patent holder can recoup that investment and thus monetize its invention. For example,

2744-429: The standard), not necessarily only members of the organization. Without such commitment, members could use monopoly power inherent in a standard to impose unfair, unreasonable and discriminatory licensing terms that would damage competition and inflate their own relative position. On the other hand, commentators stress that the FRAND commitment also serves to ensure that the holder of a patent that becomes essential to

2800-415: The standard. A technology is often more valuable after it has been widely adopted than when it is one alternative among many; there is a good argument that a license price that captures that additional value is not "reasonable" because it does not reflect the intrinsic value of the technology being licensed. On the other hand, the adoption of the standard may signal that the adopted technology is valuable, and

2856-525: The standard. For example, the rules for standards published by the major internationally recognized standards bodies such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), and ITU-T permit their standards to contain specifications whose implementation will require payment of patent licensing fees. Among these organizations, only

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2912-493: The standard. The term "standard" is sometimes restricted to technologies approved by formalized committees that are open to participation by all interested parties and operate on a consensus basis. The definitions of the term open standard used by academics, the European Union , and some of its member governments or parliaments such as Denmark , France , and Spain preclude open standards requiring fees for use, as do

2968-702: The technology as they implement it. This occurred with the Wintel architecture as others were able to start imitating the software. Less open standards exist when a particular firm has much power (not ownership) over the standard, which can occur when a firm's platform "wins" in standard setting or the market makes one platform most popular. On August 12, 2012, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Internet Society (ISOC), World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet Architecture Board (IAB), jointly affirmed

3024-514: The term "uniform fee only" (UFO) to reflect that such "(F)RAND" licenses are inherently discriminatory. Related to RAND licenses are RAND-Z (RAND with zero royalty) or RAND-RF (RAND Royalty Free) licensing, in which a company promises to license the technology at no charge, but implementers still have to get the licenser's permission to implement. The licenser may not make money off the deal but can still stop some type of products or require some type of reciprocity or do more subtle things like drag out

3080-401: The terms and the rates included in licensing agreements. As the name suggests this commitment requires that licensors treat each individual licensee in a similar manner. This does not mean that the rates and payment terms cannot change dependent on the volume and creditworthiness of the licensee. However it does mean that the underlying licensing condition included in a licensing agreement must be

3136-667: The use of Open Standards, and is applicable to sovereign entities, central public administration services (including decentralized services and public institutes), regional public administration services and the public sector. In it, Open Standards are defined thus: a) Its adoption is fruit off an open decision process accessible to all interested parties; b) The specifications document must have been freely published, allowing its copy, distribution and use without restrictions; c) The specifications document cannot cover undocumented actions of processes; d) The applicable intellectual property rights, including patents, have been made available in

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