Standard Essential Patent
Can natural justice outweigh statute, contractual confidentiality obligations and industry practice? Recently, the High Court of Delhi passed a decision in the heated FRAND dispute between InterDigital and Xiaomi concerning confidentiality clubs. [1] The Court held that that Xiaomi’s employees must necessarily have access to InterDigital’s third party patent license agreements, so that Xiaomi may…
I have the pleasure and the honor of welcoming today Professor Anne-Catherine Chriariny. Professor Chiariny teaches Patent Law and International Private Law at the University of Montpellier. She is notably the author of a famous doctoral thesis on international patent litigation awarded by the Prix Pierre Véron and the Prix Cercle Montesquieu in 2007, published in…
The Odyssey, which became synonymous for an eventful journey, originally refers to the perilous return of Odysseus to his homeland of Ithaca after the Trojan War. After the year 2020, marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, 2021 also announces numerous challenges for the world, and patentees will undoubtedly have their lot. Without trying to take the…
Introduction The debate over standard essential patents (SEPs) often focuses on the interpretation of FRAND terms and conditions and the extent to which patent owners can refuse to license their exclusive rights to implementers, and ask courts to issue injunctions against them. What is also discussed by SEPs commentators (perhaps, to a lesser extent) is…
“We are at a junction where market players lost all confidence on how they should position themselves either as SEP owners or defendants and prospective licensees.” That is the opinion of Peter Chrocziel, partner at Bardehle Pagenberg, specialist in SEP issues and editor of the book ‘International Licensing and Technology Transfer: Practice and the Law’….
A recent dispute over standard essential patent (SEP) between Inter Digital, Inc. and its affiliates (collectively “IDC“) and Xiaomi Communication Technology Co., Ltd. and its affiliates (collectively “Xiaomi“) before the Wuhan Intermediate People’s Court (“WIPC China“) has drawn wide public attention. The concerned technologies involve SEPs related to 3G and 4G standards. It is a…
As reported on Kluwer Patent Blog, the Supreme Court of England and Wales issued a key decision in the Case of Huawei and ZTE vs Conversant and Unwired Planet. Both lawsuits pertain to standard essential patents and seek to resolve how address international commercial activity from a legal perspective. The cases offer a wealth of…
This month the Mannheim Regional Court released a decision (here) in the dispute between Daimler AG, owner of the famous Mercedes-Benz brand, and the Finnish company Nokia (also see our previous post on this blog (Another CJEU ruling on standard-essential patents and FRAND looks inevitable). The controversy centred on Nokia’s European Patent EP2981103, which the German…
The UKSC Unwired Planet & Conversant judgment[1] Background This combined appeal deals with the relationship between patent owners, whose patents are declared essential to certain technical standards, and manufacturers of mobile devices (implementers) that make use of those standards. In this case, the standard essential patents (SEPs) in issue had been declared essential to the…
Cars and other motor vehicles operate such sophisticated communication technologies that today they operate almost like “smartphones on wheels”. This dependency on electronic communication means auto-manufacturers require access to the latest 4G and 5G standards essential to navigation and communications. Of course, these essential technologies are often patented and thus there are a range of…
