Posts Tagged: "essentiality"

Last week, an article was published on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) website by Matteo Sabattini, who is the director of IP Policy at Ericsson. SSRN is an open research paper repository that does not peer-review any articles that are uploaded. Sabattini’s new article, a summary of which was also recently published on IPWatchdog, is titled, “When is a portfolio probably standard-essential?” and cites several studies that determined the overall essentiality rate for 4G and 5G. Here, Sabattini cites the Concur IP study that was part of the expert witness report of witness Dr. Zhi Ding in the TCL v. Ericsson litigation case, as well as several studies published by David Edward Cooper from Hillebrand Consulting, who is an Ericsson commissioned subject matter expert and who also testified in court, e.g. for the Unwired Planet v. Huawei case. Finally, Sabattini also mentions the EU commission 2017 study conducted by IPlytics:

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 to document the fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) obligation. However, SSOs do not determine whether any of the declared patents are essential, nor are the declarants required to provide any proof or updates. As a result, in the course of licensing negotiations, patent acquisitions, or litigation, the question about which patents are essential and which are not is one of the most debated when negotiating SEP portfolio value, royalties, or infringement claims. Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions have started to support the process of understanding how patent claims relate to standards to assess larger SEP portfolios without spending weeks and months and significant dollars on manual reviews by technical subject matter experts and counsel.