Reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing

As a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory ( Fair, Reasonable and Non- Discriminatory, FRAND ) licensing terms for patents and similar broad exclusion rights are defined as having received the patent holder of the users of standards in a gentle way fees that the acceptance of the standards do not unnecessarily risk. One could also speak of standards with uniform charging scheme or, simplified payment standards. The usually carried out individually licensing process is so generalized in a form that can actually run like a goods order the proceedings and makes the licensee thereby also manageable as predictable. Graduations on the application, or numbers are possible.

Conceptually, there is also the variant RAND without F for Fair, Reasonable and Non- So Discriminatory (RAND ). To this end, there are also differences such as RAND -Z (RAND with zero royalty ) or RAND -RF (RAND Royalty Free).

Practice

A standard that is available on payment of a predictable and uniform fees, it allows its users to enter into a competition in which all candidates find similar starting conditions on the license question. Due to the pre-determined fee system thus all participants are thus protected against subsequent, unpredictable demands. This security may, of course, do not extend to items whose occupation was not known to the exclusion of rights at the time of the creation of the standards. For example, some users of the LZW data compression methods were subsequently attacked with patents ( GIF) and JPEG.

Terms and criticism

The choice of words for the concept is not without controversy, as it conveys things that are far from being implemented as universal in practice as it first gives the impression:

• Adequate ( reasonable ) does not mean that the license fee should be in any meaningful relationship to the planned own product. Thus, there are cases in which a standard has been developed for expensive medical equipment and cost per unit are correspondingly high. Even if now new use cases, such as for an electronic device of the mass market yield, so that does not necessarily mean that the license terms previously advertised ever have to be adapted to it.
• Discrimination -free ( non- discriminatory ) does not mean that all business models can live with the license. In particular, information goods ( software) are not necessarily produced and billed individual pieces. Developers of custom software, shareware and free software can the necessary licenses often can not be - in their view - get reasonable terms and are thus still discriminated against in a certain way.

Since from the point of view of many market participants a fair and non-discriminatory standards are often neither fair nor discriminatory, there are those who reject the notion RAND as a euphemism and therefore suggest, preferring instead to standards under uniform charging scheme (English Uniform Fee Only, short UFO) to speak.

Thus, there are efforts to define, at least in the area of ​​e-government transport and public software procurement the term open standards so that it excludes toll standards.

Examples

The model of uniform charging scheme is firmly established in cellular standards and in some cases quite successful (eg GSM and UMTS). Here come several manufacturers competing to develop devices and switching nodes and produce. This is possible because existing patent thickets have been overcome by a charging scheme, in which all producers receive against payment of a relatively low fee access to the market. Some other standards, such as CDMA2000, however, individual patent holders exert a very significant control.

In contrast to the GSM sector, the World Wide Web Consortium has decided not to allow any more charging scheme in future web standards. This means that patented process in web standards can not or will only be included if the patentee voluntarily renounced his rights.