Open Patent Alliance Issues Call for WiMAX Patents

The Open Patent Alliance (OPA), a group dedicated to offering intellectual property rights (IPR) solutions that support the development and widespread adoption of WiMAX, today announced a call for patents, with the intention of creating a patent pool of essential WiMAX patents. The OPA has selected Via Licensing Corporation to facilitate the formation and administration of the pool on behalf of the OPA.


OPA said an independent third-party reviewer or "patent evaluator" will evaluate submitted patents to determine whether or not they are essential. Any entity that believes it has patents or pending patent applications that are essential to WiMAX is invited to contact Via Licensing to receive information about how to submit patents for essentiality review by the independent patent evaluator.


"Today's patent call is a major milestone in our quest to create an innovative and truly open WiMAX ecosystem," said OPA President Yung Hahn. "Through the patent pool approach, not only will the OPA be able to drive down the costs of adopting WiMAX, we will be able to create a more predictable cost structure that can be accessed by infrastructure vendors, device manufacturers and application developers worldwide."


OPA members include Acer, Alcatel-Lucent, Alvarion, Cisco, Clearwire, Huawei Technologies, Intel Corporation, and Samsung Electronics, as well as newly announced associate members Beceem, GCT Semiconductor, Sequans, and UQ Communications, underscoring broad 4G ecosystem support - from semiconductors to consumer devices to service providers.
http://www.openpatentalliance.com