Vi har glädjen att presentera Jorge L. Contreras som talare på konferensen.
Presentation
Implementing Technical Standards in Open Source Software – Challenges and Practicalities of Royalty-Free Standards (Jorge L. Contreras, University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA)
Abstract
Conflicts have arisen when technical interoperability standards are covered by patents that are licensed under so-called “fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory” (FRAND) royalty terms are implemented in freely distributed open source software. One antidote to these problems is the promulgation of standards on a royalty-free (RF) basis. Numerous standards-development organizations (SDOs) around the world have adopted RF licensing policies for widely adopted standards such as Bluetooth, USB, IPv6, HTTP, HTML and XML. Yet challenges to RF licensing continue to emerge, including a recent investigation by the European Commission of the RF licensing terms adopted by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) for its RF video codec. Moreover, it is increasingly apparent that firms hold patents that cover standards that were developed with RF licensing in mind. This talk will discuss these issues as well as the practical and legal future of RF licensing for technical interoperability standards.
Biography
Jorge L. Contreras is the James T. Jensen Endowed Professor for Transactional Law and Director of the Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. He has served as a visiting fellow to the London School of Economics and Political Science (2023) and Tilburg University (2018). Prior to entering academia, Professor Contreras was a partner at the international law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP where he practiced intellectual property transactional law in Boston, Washington DC and London. Among other things, he served 20 years as principal legal counsel to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), advising the organization on numerous legal aspects of standardization, corporate governance, intellectual property and antitrust law. Prof. Contreras’s academic research focuses on intellectual property, antitrust law, technical standardization and science policy. He has published more than 150 academic articles and book chapters and has written or edited twelve books including the 2-volume Cambridge Handbook of Technical Standardization Law (NY: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2017, 2019). His scholarship has received numerous awards and recognition, including the Patent & Trademark Office Society’s 2021 Rossman Memorial Award and the University of Utah’s 2020 Distinguished Research Award. Professor Contreras has appeared before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, the Federal Trade Commission and the European Commission, and as an expert witness before courts across North America, South America and Europe. His book, The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA, was recognized by the NY Times as one of the top nonfiction books of the season and selected as the Best Patent Law Book of the Year by the IPKat blog. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute and the former co-chair of the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists. He received his JD from Harvard Law School, earned his BSEE and BA in English at Rice University and clerked for Chief Justice Thomas R. Philips of the Texas Supreme Court.