Intellectual Property Rights are a complex issue in the world of technology. The DVB Project has an innovative IPR policy laid out in Article 14 of its Memorandum of Understanding. It is designed to protect the interests of those with IPR to license, and those who are licensing the IPR in order to deploy products and services in the market place. The IPR policy of the DVB Project is outlined in paragraphs A to I below.

DVB’s Legal Director, Carter Eltzroth, has completed an article on the IPR policy of the DVB Project, including a detailed commentary on article 14 of the Memorandum of Understanding.  A prepublication version of the article is available here:

The Steering Board has reconfirmed the DVB’s policy on copyright.

It has also reconfirmed the importance of the separate IPR policies of standards bodies to which the DVB’s specifications may be submitted. For example, members are reminded of the policy of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute in notices sent to members at the time of adoption of specifications.

Article 14 has several important elements, presented in paragraphs B, C and D below.


B.

Our members are obligated to grant licences to their IPRs essential to DVB specifications on terms fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (Article 14.2).

Disputes on the terms offered by a member may be resolved by arbitration. (Article 14.7)

C.

If a member is not able to grant such a licence, it must give notice. (Articles 14.1, 14.3)

We call this process “negative disclosure”, contrasting with the approach of other bodies calling for affirmative disclosure of IPRs held by a member.

It might be worth noting that no DVB member has yet given a notice under either article 14.1 or article 14.3.

D.

The DVB fosters the formation of voluntary joint licensing programmes covering DVB specifications. (Article 14.9)

The DVB fosters by providing a mechanism for review of declarations from those claiming essential IPRs and otherwise providing a forum for discussion. The DVB does not set commercial terms for licensing.

“Routinised” submission of Declarations

DVB announced in July 2005 a standard regime for review of declarations of patents. As a specification is adopted by the DVB’s Technical Module, rights holders can immediately make declarations to the patent review coordinator:

Alan Kasper, Esq
Sughrue Mion PLLC
2100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington DC 20037-3213 , USA

Rights holders should submit declarations normally within six months after the specification is adopted. Thereafter, successful declarants will be invited to take the next steps for completing a licensing regime. This standardised regime, and the scope of review by the patent review coordinator, are further described here. A presentation on this new process can be found here.

Progress on the pooling effort for each specification is updated regularly. A table of progress can be found here. The regime announced in July 2005 replaces the prior approach which was to make “calls for declarations”, grouping for review at the same time many specifications previously adopted.

Under the old process, DVB made two calls for declarations.

First call for Declaration:

The first call resulted notably in the formation of a pool covering patents for the DVB-T transmission standard. That pool is administered today by MPEG LA, www.mpegla.com.

In addition, declarations submitted by Philips in respect of patents covering each of the following:

• Service Information (EN 300 468);
• Subtitling (EN 300 743);
• Interaction Channel over Cable (ES 200 800);

were also found to be probably essential. For the terms of license under one of more of these patents contact Philips, john.kroeze@philips.com.

No other declaration submitted in response to the first call was found to present essential IPRs. This is true most significantly in the case of the DVB-S and DVB-C transmission standards.

Second call for Declaration:

In 2003 DVB issued a second call for declarations of essential IPR. The rights holders initially identified through the declaration process have named Via Licensing to act as their facilitator.

Among other specifications, the second call covers the Multimedia Home Platform and the related OCAP specification developed by CableLabs. Information on the progress of forming a patent pool for MHP and other specifications can be found here.

Implementers should take into consideration the patent licensing schemes, outside the scope of this discussion, covering other technologies necessary or desirable for digital television, including MPEG2 and MPEG Audio. A table setting out projected approximate IPR component costs for DVB receivers, based on a compilation of publicly available information, can be found here. The DVB’s fostering does not include patent searches.

E.

The DVB coordinates its IPR policy with the policies of sister standards fora. This is important in particular for the Globally Executable MHP. The ties to our GEM partners, in particular in respect of IPR policy, are described here.

Coordination with standards fora generally follows terms of reference adopted by the Steering Board. It is important that our sister fora understand, in addition to the DVB Project's IPR policy, our policy on document disclosure.

In very rare circumstances a contribution is made to a DVB specification by an entity which is neither a DVB member nor a member of a sister forum.  We expect that such an entity to sign a statement ensuring the availability of the IPRs it holds which are essential to the DVB specification on terms comparable to those binding DVB members.

F.

More recently, a licensing and conformance testing regime was established covering, among other things, the IPRs essential to the Multimedia Home Platform held by Sun Microsystems Inc.

The DVB Blue Book, MHP Implementation Arrangements and associated agreements, A066r1 (July 2003), sets out the underlying agreements, together with an explanation of the conformance testing process. (This Blue Book also is a useful compendium of many of the documents referred to on this page. Recent Corrigenda and Addenda can be found here.) ETSI also acts as the custodian for this regime.

G.

The DVB Project owns the DVB and MHP marks. For the use of the DVB mark, an implementer files a certificate of conformity following the instructions set out on the form. For the MHP mark, the implementer should examine the arrangements described in paragraph F above.

H.

The DVB Project has an Intellectual Property Rights Module whose objective is described in article 9 MoU. DVB members can participate in the work of the IPRM. If you are a DVB member and would like to follow the work of the IPRM, please login to this website and alter your profile accordingly.

Other DVB bodies are engaged in work touching on IPR issues. For example, work has been undertaken on copy protection/copy management, relating to copyright of content.

I.

Questions on the IPR policy of the DVB Project can be addressed to the Chairman IPRM, Anthony Dixon, dixon@dvb.org, or to the DVB’s Legal Director, Carter Eltzroth, eltzroth@dvb.org.