The Ex Ante Declaration of Licensing Rights

The Digital agenda for Europe, a flagship initiative of the European Commission, includes several actions to increase interoperability between ICT services and applications. One of those actions calls for the promotion of appropriate rules for essential intellectual property rights and licensing conditions in standard setting, including for ex-ante disclosure, in particular through guidelines by 2011.
In Europe, the recently adopted Commission “Guidelines for horizontal cooperation agreements” will provide standards developing organisations with information allowing them to adopt an approach to ex-ante disclosure of licensing conditions in their IPR policy which meets the requirements of competition rules.
Some standards developing organisations also foresee the ex-ante disclosure of licensing conditions, on a mandatory or voluntary basis. It would therefore be useful to have an exchange of views between organisations implementing the ex ante disclosure principle on a mandatory basis and organisations that implement the principle on a rather voluntary basis; involving policy-makers, industry and societal stakeholders, to get a better understanding of
each other’s approaches and to identify, if possible, some best practices.

Here find attached summary pdf - 60 KB [60 KB]