Wireless Industry Majors Launch IPR Licensing Initiative

Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, NEC, NextWave Wireless, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks and Sony Ericsson have announced a mutual commitment to a framework for establishing predictable and more transparent maximum aggregate costs for licensing intellectual property rights that relate to 3GPP Long Term Evolution and Service Architecture Evolution standards.

The framework is based on the prevalent industry principle of fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) licensing terms for essential patents.

This means that the companies agree, subject to reciprocity, to reasonable, maximum aggregate royalty rates based on the value added by the technology in the end product and to flexible licensing arrangements according to the licensors’ proportional share of all standard essential intellectual property rights (IPR) for the relevant product category.

Specifically, the companies supported that a reasonable maximum aggregate royalty level for long term evolution (LTE) essential IPR in handsets is a single-digit percentage of the sales price. For notebooks, with embedded LTE capabilities, the companies support a single-digit dollar amount as the maximum aggregate royalty level.

Olivier Baujard, chief technology officer of Alcatel-Lucent, said: “As our respective companies have now launched R&D efforts and trials for LTE technology, we hope that this initiative will help for a wide adoption of this technology across devices and applications, enabling a wireless lifestyle for consumers and enterprises and creating value for technology providers.”