Analysis of early-stage proposals in standardization

This paper presents analysis results of earlystage proposals in standardization so as to consider companies' effort toward obtaining standard-essential patents (SEPs). The number of the SEPs has greatly increased in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) field. Some companies in the ICT field strategically aim to obtain SEPs. It is important for such companies to file patents timely and to propose their technologies covered by the patents to standardization bodies from the early stage of the standardization process. oneM2M Release 1, a standard for Machine to Machine (M2M), is investigated in this study. First, proponents of each item in the functional-requirement specification discussed in the early stage are analyzed in order to know technical areas in which major companies are interested. Then, the relationship between the interesting areas (the early-stage proposals) of the major companies and their patents is investigated. The investigation results show that the early-stage proposals by vendors (manufacturers) are highly overlapped with their patents. It can be said that the vendors are strategically proposing from early stages in order to get SEPs. On the other hand, less overlap is observed in nonpracticing entities (NPEs) and mobile operators. Since NPEs filed patents in a wide range of the technical fields, it is likely to have intention to obtain SEPs by employing other companies' proposals. The mobile operators have the relatively large number of proposals as compared with the number of filed patents. It can be said that they consider that it is important to make the M2M market larger rather than to make benefit from SEPs. From the observation above, one can conclude that the companies in different business categories have different strategies in the standardization from the viewpoint of obtaining SEPs.