eir own, or of accepting the existence of two transmission standards, 2.048 Mbit/s (and A-law codec) in Europe standards. If standards are developed too early then the danger and 1.544 Mbit/s (and u-law codec) in the USA and Japan. Even is that technology will change and make the standard obsolete. recently the CCITT has had to adopt two standards for ISDN rate Standards often need to be developed to cover every aspect of adaption, V.110 promoted by ECMA and V.120 promoted by T1 and the intended application. This would probably result in an ANSI. overlap in standards, with duplication. The alternative is to In order to accommodate the many conflicting interests, the inter- avoid duplication, but allow de facto standards in areas which national standards making organisations often concentrate on pro- have not been covered. ducing what are known as base standards. These contain permissible It is difficult, when developing a new standard, to know when variants or alternative methods, which are implementor defined an intellectual property right (IPR) is being infringed. This is facilities. Adopting any of these variants would mean that the often due to the time lag between the filing of a patent and the International standard making bodies STANDARDS Regional FUNCTIONAL standard STANDARDS making bodies groups Trade associations Independent test CONFORMANCE organisations TESTING Figure 22.2 Base standards, functional standards and conformance testing International standards organisations 22/5 information being revealed by a search. This means that a took a long time to produce and the final output was often open to standard may contain elements of an IPR. The problem is then interpretation. It was at that stage that the principal responsibility of how it should be licensed to other users. Should the IPR for standards was delegated to other organisations such as CEPT, holder be expected to license it to anyone who requests it, CCITT and CCIR. including his competitors? Furthermore, how should the licence be priced, espe