Intellectual Property Rights Policies in Standards Development Organizations and the Impact on Trade Issues with the People’s Republic of China

Patent Group, American National Standards Institute (ANSI)

1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 6/10/2004)

U.S. industry is facing challenges in countries (such as China) that appear to be (a) mandating conformance to nationalized standards developed in a closed process, and (b) devising and implementing related intellectual property policies that are not transparent to U.S. companies and in many cases run counter to international norms. ANSI's Patent Group, largely made up of a cross-section of information technology, semi-conductor, electronics and telecommunications companies (and several related standards developers), wants to apprise U.S. government officials of the nature and gravity of this situation. While the U.S. government has worked extremely hard to effectively resolve the Chinese WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI) standard issue, there are other aspects to Chinese standardization that raise different (if somewhat related) concerns.