Patenting and Voluntary Standards: Tensions Between the Domains of Proprietary Assets and “Public Goods” in the Innovation of Network Technologies

This article focuses on the interaction between intellectual property rights (IPRs) regimes and committee-based standards development organisations (SDOs) in terms of the commodification of knowledge. IPRs and SDOs are institutions that are designed to codify technical knowledge with quite different purposes though. The resulting documents describe a private right (patent) or a public good (a standard). The article associates the former with a commodification and the latter with a decommodification process of technical knowledge, and it explores a situation in which these respective purposes have come into conflict. The scope for conflict is examined and analysed in light of the controversy, which emerged during the standardization of GSM telephony in Europe.