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Craig Thompson
General Manager and COO
Unified Consulting
Craig Thompson is the General Manager and COO for Unified Consulting. He has decades of experience in the IP field focused on strategy, patent and technology licensing, and IP-driven acquisitions. Craig co-founded TnT IP, LLC, a global IP consulting partnership, and headed up the IP Group at Alcatel Lucent and Bell Labs and was on the Senior Leadership Team of Nokia’s Mobile Phones Group with responsibility for the Group’s IP and legal matters. Craig started his legal career as an associate and later as a partner with Finland’s largest law firm Roschier where he practiced IP, technology, energy, data protection, competition, communications, and M&A law for 10 years. Craig is a law graduate of the University of Helsinki (Masters of Law, 1994) and of the Columbia University Law School (LLM, 1997).
Recent Articles by Craig Thompson
In Part I of this two-part article, we provided an analysis of the Wi-Fi 6 litigation and technology landscape. This Part II discusses important changes to the IEEE rules governing the reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) licensing encumbrances on SEPs held by participants in IEEE standardization work. Unfortunately, these rule changes fall short of clarifying what RAND means for Wi-Fi licensors and implementers. Instead, fueled by Wi-Fi 6’s growing valuation and adoption of heavily patented core technologies from LTE and 5G, the rule changes arguably will only heat up the current litigation trend.
Wi-Fi 6 shares new technologies with LTE and 5G that are subject to heavy patenting. The firms and institutions that currently monetize their standard essential patents (SEPs) against LTE and 5G will likely be looking to increase their royalty income from Wi-Fi 6 and 6e. This could mean that the recent disputes over LTE and 5G standardization participants’ fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) SEP licensing commitments will spill over into Wi-Fi. Current Wi-Fi litigation trends suggest that this is already afoot, and the recent licensor-friendly changes in the IEEE IPR rules are feared to only fuel this trend.