Hi. David L. Cohen from David L. Cohen, PC, and Kidon IP. Corporation. We help you make money from your intellectual property. Today I’m going to talk about technical standards. What’s a technical standard? A technical standard is something like the metric system or Bluetooth, 4G WiFi. All of these things.
How do they come about? Well, they come about because groups of people or groups of organizations come and develop them. This is one of the unsung, developments of Herbert Hoover often forgotten about because of certain things that happened in1929, the Depression and whatnot with Franklin Roosevelt. But he was the main reason why we have technical standards now.
What does that allow us to do? What technical standards allow us to do is it allows you to develop whole businesses and industries around standardized components like mobile phones in a standard way that your phone would connect to the wider network. Then we couldn’t have thousands and thousands of phones, and there wouldn’t be whole industries developed on top of that. Now, one of the challenges with technical standards is everyone has to come to agree as to what they are: How does the phone work? How does a phone communicate with the cell towers? How did the cell towers communicate with the larger infrastructure network?
Well, in order to do that, all of these industries have all these industry players have to come together and develop a whole set of technical documentation, usually through consensus and usually through a long and elaborate process. Now that’s a wonderful thing when you have industries coming together and making things better for the world. And that’s one of the reasons why Herbert Hoover pushed it because it created all different kinds of efficiencies and economies of scale and help the economy.
One of the dangers is that you have a whole industry coming together and developing things and making it really, really hard for outside players coming in. And that is why when you’re involved in technical standards, antitrust law, competition law is very, very much involved. And if there’s intellectual property involved in that as well, it creates the whole level of complexity that can bedevil the most sophisticated attorneys and business folks.
And in fact, if you study the issue, most of our fights with China, and most of our fights with Europe about technology all relate back on some level to technical standards. And that is why you need expert help to help you figure it all out. That’s one of my areas that I focus on.
My name is David All Cohen David L. Cohen PC, and Kidon IP Corporation. If you have any questions about technical standards please feel free to reach out. Thank you very much.
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