| Thursday, October 11, 2018 - Friday, October 12, 2018 |
On October 11-12, 2018, Richard Taffet will speak on a panel entitled “The Future of Standard Setting, 5G, and Where It's All Headed,” at the Sixth Annual Fall Conference hosted by the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property (CPIP) at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, in Arlington, Virginia.
Patented innovations and the standard setting organizations that incorporate them into technological standards play an essential role in the effective operation of the high-tech industries. This is particularly true for the mobile revolution, which is based on technological standards like WiFi and CDMA (currently in its 4th generation (4G)). Within many standard setting organizations, there has been an extensive policy debate in recent years between the innovators who develop these communication technologies and the implementers who use these technologies in the products and services they sell to consumers. How best to balance the interests of innovators who invest billions over many years in risky R&D to create this technology and the implementers who build upon it with their own investments in smartphones and other mobiles devices sold as consumer products?
On the cusp of the shift to 5G—a massive technological leap forward in wireless communication on par with the development of the 3G standard at the turn of the century—this panel will discuss how this critical policy question has been addressed to date and what this portends for standard setting organizations in the coming years.