FRANDly fire: are industry standards doing more harm than good?

Legal context: The role of IP rights in standards; the meaning of the obligationimposed by many standards bodies on essential patent holdersto licence on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (‘FRAND’)terms; the example of IPR policy of the European TelecommunicationsStandards Institute; recent US developments. Key points: Industry standards are of key commercial and technical significance.Yet many standards are currently burdened by litigation betweenessential patent holders and licensees. Such standards bodieshave been slow to give guidance on the meaning of the obligationsimposed on essential patent holders. This article takes theexample of the obligation to licence essential patents on FRANDterms, analysing the obligation in the context of European competitionlaw. The article concludes with some suggestions for pointsfor companies to include in their internal policies on licensingstandards essential patents. Practical significance: The meaning of the obligation to licence on FRAND terms is veryimportant for licensors and licensees alike. This article putsthe obligation in context and discusses the various approacheswhich may be taken in practice.     

Official Discourse

This paper analyses two Official Reports on law and order. They confront legitimation deficits, seeking discursively to redeem them by denial of their material geneses. This denial establishes an absence in the discourse. This absence, the Other, is the silence of a world constituted by material relations whose reality cannot be appropriated by a mode of normative argument which speaks to and from its own self-image via an idealised conception of justice. The paper discusses first the Reports' discursive problems, secondly, the disparate jurisprudential knowledges realised by the texts, and lastly the discursive presentation of these knowledges.     

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC INSTABILITY IN COSTA RICA: PRE-CONDITIONS FOR MILITARIZATION?

Controversy continues to surround the issue of militarization in Costa Rica. On one side, claims are made that external forces such as the Reagan administration or other foreign powers have created the recent period of social and economic instability in order to militarize Costa Rica and extend military influence in Central America. On the other hand, it has been argued that some of these external agents are simply offering aid to their Costa Rican friends during a period of social and economic instability. Similar contentions suggest that Costa Rica is only protecting itself from its neighbor to the north, Nicaragua, or that the present move toward militarization is only the professionalization of the police force. This paper examines some of the conditions that promote militarization in Costa Rica and explores moral, economic, and political issues related to the militarization of a country that has pursued a "no army" policy for almost forty years.     

A NEW DEFENSE POLICY FOR COSTA RICA: CONSTRUCTING REALITY AND THE POLICY AGENDA

This paper examine5 the policymaking progress in Costa Rica, specifically the creation of a new item for the governmental agenda. This new agenda challenges the traditional Itno army" policy of Costa Kica. Following a brief historical overview of the traditional policy, the paper considers the role of specific factors that promote structural conduciveness for the new "defense" policy and the attendant transformation of political symbols and definitions. The impact of the definitional and organizational changes on the implementation stage of policy is explored. This article suggests the importance of studying the role of hegemony in the construction and transformation of political and cultural definitions, an explication of deci- sionmaking as well as nondecisionmaking processes, and the influence of external and internal threats on nation-state dependency.