Posts Tagged: "standard essentiality"

Navigating SEP Determination Challenges with Quality Claim Charts

When licensing standard essential patents (SEPs), the SEP licensor and the standard implementer (also known as the SEP licensee), go through two phases of negotiation. The first phase is the technical phase, followed by the second phase, the commercial discussion. In the technical phase, the SEP licensor must provide evidence that at least one patent of its portfolio is valid and standard essential. This is done by providing rigorously conducted claim charts that map claims against the standard’s sections, providing evidence that all claim elements read on the technical standard specification. Typically, only a few claim charts are needed in this first technical phase, since only one patent must be valid and essential to make the case that the standard implementing party is infringing. The second phase, the commercial discussion, is much more complex. Here, the SEP owner must provide evidence of the value of its SEP portfolio for a given standard supporting why the proposed royalty rate is FRAND (fair reasonable and non- discriminatory).

Where AI Works Well and Where it Doesn’t in Predicting Standard Essentiality for Patents

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is providing enormous productivity and increased value in many applications. But AI is no panacea and is not yet sufficiently well developed to be precise or dependable everywhere. For example, much better AI training data is required to reliably estimate patent essentiality to standards such as 4G and 5G, where AI is being advocated by various experts and has already been adopted by one patent pool. There is also a lot of room for improvement in inferencing.

Federal Circuit Clarifies That Standard-Essentiality is a Question for the Factfinder

On August 4, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) affirmed a decision of the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware in Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1 v. TCL Commc’n Tech, wherein the district court held that TCL was liable for infringement by way of its sale of LTE standard-compliant devices…. The CAFC initially said that it agreed with the district court’s ruling and reasoning, but wrote to address a question not before addressed by the CAFC case law: “who determines the standard-essentiality of the patent claims at issue—the court, as part of claim construction, or the jury, as part of its infringement analysis?”