SEP Essentials

Since I have been so focused of late on Huawei’s conduct in the IEEE, I noticed two recent Huawei deals.  They have been treated as unrelated, but I wonder whether they are, in fact, part and parcel of Huawei’s SEP strategy.  Hence my title: pirates on the move.  1. Nokia acquires Wi-Fi 7 related patents from Huawei .  Buried in an announcement from Nokia that was posted on December 11, 2025 ( New Wi-Fi licensing deals in automotive | Nokia ) is this statement: “In additio

Those were the words on everyone’s lips at both IAM’s SEP Summit Global 2025 in London (“IAM’s Summit”) and at the Symposium on Standard Essential Patents hosted by the World Intellectual Property Organization (“WIPO”) in Geneva (“WIPO Symposium”).  The Honorable Justice Mellor of the Chancery Division of the U.K. High Court put it most succinctly at IAM’s Summit: the biggest issue related to SEPs today is the lack of transparency. [1]  On nearly every panel, nearly everyone,

Industry standards can be very beneficial to the public good.  They can make products more efficient and less costly to manufacture, ensure that products sold by different companies work well together (“interoperate”), increase safety, improve quality and enable further technological innovation.  In short, “good standards are good for business, good for consumers, and good for society.” [1] But, because of the nature of standard development and of standards themselves, the p

A while back (see https://www.sepessentials.com/post/building-a-house ), I likened standards to blueprints for a house.  But standards are actually a lot less complete than a typical blueprint.  A blueprint is defined variously as “a design plan or other technical drawing” or “a complete plan that explains how to do or develop something.” [1]   The word blueprint implies that, by following the blueprint, you will end up with a functional house or other product (although some

Here is my third and last post on the Global Standards Leadership Conference that I attended.  You can find my other two posts here: Global Standards Leadership Conference - Part 1 ( sepessentials.com )  and Global Standards Leadership Conference - Part 2 ( sepessentials.com ) .  This post focuses on the “New Frontiers of SEP Licensing” panel.  The panelists were John Han from Qualcomm, John Kolakowski from Nokia, Ran Xu from Xiaomi, Ryan Cunningham from Sheppard Mullin and M

Welcome to the second installment of my review of the Global Standards Leadership Conference which took place on June 13, 2024, at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business.  You can find my first post about it here: Global Standards Leadership Conference - Part 1 ( sepessentials.com ) .  Today I am focusing on the speech given by David Teece, a professor at the Haas School of business at UC-Berkeley where the event was held. Despite opining on SEP valua

I recently attended the Global Standards Leadership Conference organized by Justus Baron (Northwestern University), Kirti Gupta (Cornerstone Research, previously at Qualcomm), and Tim Pohlmann (LexisNexis® IPlytics) which took place on June 13, 2024, at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business.  It was an interesting and well-attended conference with a number of different panels and a keynote speaker from UC-Berkeley.  Here are some of the more notewort

We have spent some time recently working on our house which got me thinking about how standards are akin to blueprints for a house.  Blueprints help a builder put a house together, but they do not specify every detail that ultimately needs to be completed to create a finished house.  Often, these details are omitted on purpose because they are not necessary to build the house or because clients want to vary those details based on preference or budget.  Sometimes, a significan

Kathi Vidal, Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, spoke today at the Berkeley-Stanford Advanced Patent Law Institute held at Stanford Law School along with Konstantinos Georgaras, CEO of the Canadian IP Office.  It was an interesting chat all around with a good discussion of each office’s diversity efforts, encouragement of underrepresented communities not only to file applications but to continue with them after a preliminary rejection and a lot on AI and the ch

Here are the answers to the quiz. The first set of cases was the dispute between Microsoft and Motorola, the second the IPCom litigation with Lenovo and the third the Conversant/Huawei dispute. The jurisdictions and why they are outliers are as follows. Jurisdiction 1 – the United States . Patent damages in the United States, including for SEPs, usually are much higher than anywhere else in the world. The US is also a very large market for consumer based standardized prod

Historically, when licensing negotiations fail, large SEP holders file patent infringement lawsuits in multiple jurisdictions against a single implementer. Sometimes implementers file breach of contract (for breach of the FRAND commitment) or declaratory judgement actions against SEP holders when negotiations break down. Here is the story of three such disputes. Each of the jurisdictions listed below is an outlier in its own way. Can you name each of the jurisdictions?