Posts Tagged: "patent pools"

A group of 25 experts in intellectual property law sent a letter to Assistant Attorney General (AAG) Jonathan Kanter today in support of a business review letter that the group said, “represented a legally sound and evidence-based approach in applying antitrust law to innovative commercial institutions.” The letter is also a response to an earlier letter sent to Kanter on October 17, 2022, by 28 former government enforcement officials, professors, and public interest advocates that urged the AAG to reconsider the business review letter. The Avanci business review letter was published by the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice on July 28, 2020. In the letter, the DOJ said that Avanci’s licensing platform, which plans to license patent claims declared essential to implement 5G in cars, did not harm competition in the industry. Business review letters represent guidance by the DOJ to inform businesses how to best coordinate their practices to ensure they don’t violate antitrust laws.

Collaboration has invariably helped people to maneuver the most significant challenges and hurdles. Like all other human accomplishments, technology players have collaborated and enforced methodologies to avert any obstacles faced while creating innovation-driven sustainable businesses, to enable technology-driven societies. While innovation can be both an individual and collective endeavor, shaping the final consumer product/service demands collaborative innovation and coordinated policies and frameworks. 

Standard Essential Patents (SEPs), as the name suggests, are an essential set of patents used for the implementation of a standardized technology. This set of patents renders it impossible to implement or operate standard-compliant equipment without infringement. Does that mean every patent declared by any company is essential? In a word, no. This article intends to address this aspect in detail and pave way for licensees to save costs and pay for what they use in their implementations.

In a previous article, we laid out the basics of “patent pools”, which license patents that are declared essential for technology standards. A recent article published in the University of San Diego Law Review, titled Glory Days: Do the Anticompetitive Risks of Standards-Essential Patent Pools Outweigh Their Procompetitive Benefits? (Glory Days), criticized patent pools, alleging inefficiencies and anticompetitive risks of pools for standard essential patents (SEPs). While the authors make several rebuttable suggestions, the crux of the authors’ complaints about SEP patent pools is that SEP pools should bear all the burdens and expenses of verifying with a litigation-grade level of certainty that all patents in the pool are essential and valid before an implementer will even engage in a licensing discussion with the pool. This approach is not economically or practically realistic and is designed to justify hold out and provide cover for implementers to refuse to engage in licensing discussions.

Implementers of standard essential technology such as Long-Term Evolution (LTE) are constantly attempting to reduce costs for implementation. This behavior has led to certain inefficiencies in the marketplace, such as innovators not being compensated for their contributions to technological standards. The symbiotic relationship between innovators and implementers cannot continue where one side takes all the risk and the other side reaps all the reward. One construct put in place by innovators to extract compensation from the marketplace are patent pools that license patents that are declared essential for technology standards.

Versatile video coding (VVC), also known as Future Video Coding (FVC) or H.266, is a video compression standard that was released on July 6 and is being positioned as the successor to High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC or H.265). CPA Global has reviewed the key aspects of the standard and factors which could impact its licensing and adoption and we have identified and analyzed the key patented technologies that have a possibility of being relevant to the VVC standard. The standard was in the process of being finalized at the time we conducted our analysis and we have therefore referred to Draft 8 of VVC, which was approved by JVET in the Brussels meeting from January 7-17, 2020.

On Friday, May 29, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially launched the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP), an initiative which is intended to improve access to treatments, vaccines and other medical technologies which are developed in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The program, initially proposed by Costa Rica, has highlighted the tension between pharmaceutical developers and advocates for access to medicine, which has been magnified by the economic concerns created during the global shutdown.

The latest television technology (4K) contains four times the number of pixels as 1080p (full HD). Without HEVC, broadcasters wanting to transmit programs in 4K quality face the challenge of needing high quality broadband reception to make 4K broadcasts a reality. A benefit of HEVC is that it makes broadcasting 4K more feasible – reducing both the cost and time it takes to deliver high quality programming. While the technology is anticipated to be used in almost all video processors and display devices in the future, adoption remains slow because of a complex licensing scenario.