Geneva, 11 January 2019
Background
On June 10, 2013 the Ecma General Assembly approved an experimental Royalty Free (RF) Patent Policy for Ecma TC39 (ECMAScript). On December 10, 2013 Ecma General Assembly approved an experimental Royalty Free Patent Policy for Ecma TC52 (Dart).
At its June 17, 2015 Ecma General Assembly (GA) in Montreux (CH) came to the conclusion that sufficient positive experience has been gathered with the Ecma TC39 and TC52 “experimental Royalty-Free patent policies” and decided that the “experimental” TC39 and TC52 RF patent policies shall become with immediate effect “Ecma-wide” patent policy options.
In general the RF Ecma patent policy has been a “success story”. Most SDOs do not have such a patent policy option, as their Patent Policy is solely RAND based. The RF Patent Policy is thus a huge advantage for Ecma in some special standardization areas, like scripting languages, that belong to “RF base web standards”.
Extension of the Ecma RF
On December 12, 2018 at the 116th Ecma General Assembly in Boston – on the request of some Ecma TCs – the Ecma RF Patent Policy was extended.
Until then the RF Patent Policy only covered designated Task Groups of an Ecma TC as “Royalty-Free Task Group” (“RFTG”). With the extended policy also entire Ecma TCs can be declared as subject of the Royalty Free Patent Policy.
This addition was permitted as so far all Ecma TCs using the RF Ecma Patent Policy Options de-facto have been operating as RFTCs. In fact no part of the TC was operating under the classical RAND patent policy. Therefore this small extension is just a practical simplification to the RF patent Policy rules that takes such reality into account.
For more information: please contact Dr. Istvan Sebestyen, Secretary General of Ecma International. Email: istvan@ecma-international.org.