With respect to standard-essential patent licensing, my preferred European voice of reason(ableness) is the Fair Standards Alliance, an organization Google recently joined and which I'd like to see Apple and Samsung team up with at some point. On the other end of the spectrum, there's a lobbying group named IP Europe. While I personally know and respect two of the individuals working for that one, I fundamentally disagree with its policy positions and object to its false claim of supporting "innovatives SMEs." IP Europe advances the cause of patent trolls and of businesses that failed in the mobile phone business for a lack of innovation and increasingly resort to patent licensing as a revenue source.
Looking at IP Europe's member list, it's generally easy to see why each of those organizations expects to gain something from overpatenting and from an overcompensation of patentees, with a couple of exceptions, however.
Orange (France Telecom) is a carrier. In the U.S., mobile carriers are usually on the reasonable side (and sometimes go too far even for my taste when making public-interest arguments in amicus curiae briefs). Does the former France Teleom plan to engage in patent trolling like its British counterpart? I don't know, but it was most likely a mistake that Orange joined IP Europe.
The other, better-known and even more surprising member is Airbus Group. The only explanation I have for Airbus's decision to join IP Europe is that an IP-incompetent senior management has allowed the patent professionals running Airbus's IP department to hijack the company in order to advance the interests of their profession rather than defend the interests of their current employer.
In the airplane business, Airbus only stands to lose from excessive patent royalties. In the defense and space businesses, patents won't protect Airbus either. In 2012, Elon Musk already explained why SpaceX (which in a few years of existence has already achieved technically more impressive feats than Airbus in its much longer history) generally doesn't file for patents.
I want my Munich area-based startup to be very innovative in its niche, but generally speaking, Europe has a huge innovation gap versus Silicon Valley. California has Elon Musk. Europe has Tom Enders. Tom who? Well, the CEO of Airbus studied politics, started his career in politics, and at a heavily-subsidized intergovernmental joint venture like Airbus, political connections are more important than anything else. Elon Musk, despite all of his amazing talents, would never get a top job at an organization like Airbus. Fortunately, he doesn't need it.
When the CEO of a company that should be technology-driven is absolutely not a technologist (but a political scientist/historian), it just takes a self-serving IP department to make the company sign up with a lobbying group like IP Europe, thereby teaming up with highly litigious patent assertion entities (PAEs)/non-practicing entities (NPEs).
One of IP Europe's key priorities--if not its number one priority--is to fight against the "smallest saleable unit" approach to FRAND license fees. Do the bureaucrats in charge of Airbus even know what that means for their business? Presumably they don't. What if someone made a Motorola-like patent royalty claim and demanded a percentage of the sales price of an entire Airbus plane over a few WiFi, video or whatever patents?
Do those decision-makers realize that the number of potentially patented "inventions" in an Airbus that third parties hold account for a vast majority of all patentable "inventions" in a modern airplane? It has been estimated that 250,000 patents are embodied in a smartphone. In practical terms, the digital entertainment and communications technology installed in today's planes is increasingly like that, and actually much bigger.
To many of you this may seem obvious, but let me explain this for the rest: there is no such thing as a software patent that guarantees stability and security. The reason: no matter what a patent may describe (with or without specificity), it can always be implemented in an unstable and insecure fashion.
Airbus has a software quality problem. Last year Airbus even admitted that a software configuration error caused the crash of a military transporter, and I vaguely remember a crash of a commercial Airbus plane many years ago that some experts attributed to a software issue. In terms of success factors in the airplane business, that is what Airbus should be focusing on. It has nothing to do with patents. Any code that is stable or unstable, secure or insecure, is protected by copyright (and trade secrets). Any configuration that is stable or unstable, secure or insecure, is a matter of quality assurance.
If Airbus focused on software quality, it wouldn't have to fear copycats. If someone copied great code, copyright (not patent) law would protect Airbus.
Airbus is the craziest example now of a company that builds highly multifunctional products and opposes the "smallest saleable unit" approach to patent license fees. But maybe Airbus is not really a company. It's more of an intergovernmental organization that is detached from economic realities because taxpayers will have to foot the bill if anything goes wrong.
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