In a new study by Boston University’s Timothy Simcoe and Qing Zhang from Charles River Associates (using support from Unified’s OPEN platform and Edge / Patent Quality Initiative), the pair researched the impact of changes to Standard Setting Organization (SSO) intellectual property rights (IPR) policies on participation, standardization, and innovation for two well-known IPR policy revisions: a 2003 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) switch from Fair Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) to Royalty-Free licensing and a 2015 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) IPR policy revision. The study found these changes resulted in little or no measurable decline in participation or innovation in patent-intensive parts of either SSO. The results held for both the W3C and IEEE across numerous measures and “treatment” vs “control” group comparisons. These quantitative findings appear to contradict the theory that revisions to licensing policy alter participation in any meaningful way.

To download the entire article, visit SSRN HERE.