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Standardization and intellectual properties

The United States and European countries have been working on strategic international standardization activities from the viewpoint of disseminating the results of their industrial technologies to global markets. It has become important for Japan to also make efforts towards international standardization in a strategic manner so as to support the adoption of our creative R&D results as international standards and to contribute to the enhancement of Japan’s industrial competitiveness.

Meanwhile, the recent trends of accelerating technological advancement, increasing significance of the Forum Standards, and strengthening protection of intellectual property rights have led to the intertwining of issues concerning standardization policies with those concerning intellectual property and competition policies, which have previously been dealt with separately. Therefore, it is now necessary to consider the issues concerning intellectual property and competition policies in tandem with standardization policies.

Under such circumstances, the Standards Board of the JISC compiled the “Procedures Concerning Establishment of JIS, Including Patent Rights, etc.” in February 2001 so as to clarify the handling of patent rights as part of the establishment of the JIS. Thereafter, responding to trends established by international standardization organizations, such as the work towards the standardization of the Patent Policy undertaken by ISO/IEC and ITU, which specifies how to handle intellectual property in the course of standardization, the Board revised the Procedures, culminating in the “Procedures Concerning Establishment, etc. of JIS, Including Patent Rights, etc.” in April 2006, so as to render these procedures consistent with the Common Patent Policy for ITU-T/ITU-R/ISO/IEC compiled by international standardization organizations.

With regard to standardization of the Patent Policy by ISO/IEC and ITU, approval procedures for all related organizations were finalized in February 2006. The standardized Patent Policy is about to come into effect. For details on the Common Patent Policy for ITU-T/ITU-R/ISO/IEC, access the following URL.

       http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/dbase/patent/patent-policy.html (linked to the external website)

 

The significance of the handling of intellectual property rights in the course of standardization is also fully recognized by the government. The “Intellectual Property Strategic Program 2006,” the details of which were established at the 14th Strategic Council on Intellectual Property on June 8, 2006, contains “Chapter 3 Intellectual Property Exploitation, 2. Support for International Standardization Activities.” For details thereon, access the following URL.

 

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