One of the major challenges when licensing, transacting, or managing Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) is that there is no public database that provides information about verified SEPs. Standard-setting organizations (SSOs) such as ETSI (4G / 5G), IEEE (Wi-Fi), or ITUT (HEVC/VVC) maintain databases of so-called self-declared patents that are required to be licensed pursuant to a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) commitment by patent owners. Unfortunately, SSOs do not determine whether any of these self-declared patents are actually essential, nor are the declarants required to provide any proof or updates.

Because SSOs require the disclosure of any patent asset that does or may relate to the standard at issue, and this disclosure is done well in advance of finalization of the standard, many patents that ultimately do not relate to the adopted standard have been declared. This means the databases maintained by the SSOs contain both patents that actually read on the standard, or various parts thereof, as well as patents that cover technologies not selected to be a part of the standard. This makes SEP declaration databases the best publicly available source of information, but they can realistically only function as the starting point to understand actual SEP ownership.

On Thursday, March 31, 2022, at 12 PM ET, please join Hon. Theodore Essex, Judge, U.S. International Trade Commission (ret.) and presently Senior Counsel at Hogan Lovells in Washington, D.C., Shawn Ambwani (Unified Patents) and Tim Pohlmann (IPlytics) in a wide-ranging conversation moderated by Gene Quinn (IPWatchdog). The panel will discuss using AI solutions to assist in licensing and litigation when attempting to answer the question – which patents are essential to the standard?

In addition to taking your questions, the panel will also specifically address:

• Why with standards such as 5G, with over 40,000 declared and active patent families, it is economically not feasible to manually map thousands of declared patents.
•  Estimated actual essentiality rates being likely only 10%-20% of declared portfolios based on the use of random sampling.
•  New AI based approaches to make use of human based claim mapping results in order to extrapolate the given information allowing professionals to make assumptions about the overall actual essentiality rate for standards such as 5G.
• Why courts seem reluctant (so far) to accept the AI based approach as a valid data point in FRAND litigation.

About Our Sponsor:

Unified is a 200+ international membership organization that seeks to improve patent quality and deter unsubstantiated or invalid patent assertions in defined technology sectors (Zones) through its activities. Its actions are focused broadly in Zones with substantial assertions by Standards Essential Patents (SEP) holders and/or Non-Practicing Entities (NPEs). These actions may include analytics, prior art, invalidity contests, patentability analysis, administrative patent review (PTAB), amicus briefs, economic surveys, and essentiality studies. Unified works independently of its members to achieve its deterrence goals. Small members join for free while larger ones pay modest annual fees.

About Our Co-Sponsor:

IPLytics is the first solution on the market to bring together comprehensive, highly indexed technical standards information, declared SEPs, patent pools, global patents and standards contribution data, to provide industry-leading analysis on the past, present and future of standards-essential technology. Unlike other tools that are overly complex, IPlytics provides fast, intuitive access to patents and standards to empower the user to strategically align patent portfolios to protect innovations and proactively engage in continuous strategic portfolio development as it relates to SEP assets, for initiatives such as licensing, acquisitions and joining patent pools, or simply to understand the respective positions of the competition. The next technology revolution will connect everything making it even more challenging to understand how technologies and IP rights overlap. IP professionals need to rethink – even revolutionize – how to approach both patent and standards data, to provide business-ready insights for actionable decision making across the organization. Just last year IPlytics has released a first AI based features allowing to assess a patent’s essentiality for a given standard such as 4G, 5G, Wi-Fi or HEVC/VVC.