About Us  |  Membership |  Help
Sign In |  Register

About the TM Forum

IPR Policy

The TM Forum Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Policy (revised 2012) helps improve business effectiveness for our members and provides the flexibility needed in this new digital industry along with the necessary framework for protecting all Forum members’ IP rights.

As you may recall, a draft of a revised IPR policy was circulated to members for comment last autumn and we held a series of webinars. A number of important member comments were received, so the Board decided to further refine the policy to address these. The Governance Subcommittee was expanded and included representatives from at&t, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, France Telecom, IBM, Microsoft, Reliance Communications and Telstra. The task of the committee has been to represent a broad scope of membership interests and balance the interests of contributors to Forum standards and implementers.

The primary changes to the previous Policy draft include:
  • Ensuring the rights and obligations contained in the current (1989) policy are maintained
  • Speeding up availability of Forum work
  • Tailoring IPR approach more closely to project needs rather than a one-size-fits-all
  • Bringing IPR policy in line with industry best practice
  • Broadening the scope of the policy to embrace new media and methods of collaboration
  • Greater flexibility in the way IP and patent rights can be managed for individual projects
A list of frequently asked questions has been produced to clarify key points in the IPR Policy and to provide further explanation of how this new Policy will affect Members. Please review the documents below to assist in understanding the new IP Policy.

If you are an authorized Member IP Contact, online intellectual property administration activities are managed here, IPR Administration

The Collaboration Program Process document below provides a high level description of the Collaboration Program processes which have been revised to accommodate the new TM Forum IPR Policy. Additional detailed process descriptions can be found at www.tmforum.org/DetailedProcessDocuments/2433/home.html

 
Feedback
How would you rate the quality of this content?
     
*
Email address*

Tell us why you rated the content this way (optional).