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

My recent post, Licensing in the Real World - A Primer on SEP License Agreements , discussed and showed examples of key licensing provisions from actual SEP licenses.  Now that you know what types of provisions are in most “pure” [1] SEP license agreements and what language is commonly used for those provisions, let’s revisit the question of confidentiality.  The first question is, since most of us (and now you if you read my prior post) know what provisions are in most SEP

In my early days of licensing, I believed my company had a competitive advantage because of the provisions we had in our standard patent licensing agreement.  We believed very few companies were using similar provisions in their licenses, and that our provisions were better than theirs.  Perhaps that belief was hubris or perhaps it was correct at the time. [1]   But, to the extent that used to be true, it isn’t anymore.  Over the years, license agreements (including SEP licen

A few days ago, Intel Corporation (“ Intel ”) won a jury verdict against a patent licensing entity called VLSI Technology LLC (“ VLSI ”).  The jury found that VLSI was controlled by a patent investment company called Fortress Investment Group (“ Fortress ”).  The jury also found that Fortress controlled another patent licensing entity known as Finjan Inc. (" Finjan ").  The net net of this is that Finjan and VLSI have now been found to be “Affiliates” of each other within the

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the rubric of willing/unwilling has passed its use by date (see Time to Throw Away the Willing/Unwilling Paradigm ).  Today I wanted to talk about what it is like to negotiate a license under that rubric.   This post is based on my decades of experience being involved in SEP license negotiations and disputes. It contains actual (anonymized) quotes from correspondence between various SEP licensors and implementers over those years. The Deman

A lot of my practice these days involves technology development deal work.  This includes intellectual property license agreements where technology and know-how is transferred, and agreements to collaborate on developing new technologies.  This type of work is great: I love helping companies grow their business and develop innovative and interesting new technology.  Negotiations for these types of deals can sometimes take a long time – several months or even as long as a year

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

If you have been keeping up with my posts, you would know that I have recently focused on issues related to SEP licensing in the IoT space.  I am, of course, not the only one interested in the potential impact of SEP licensing on this really important and burgeoning area of technology.  There have been a lot of articles and posts related to SEPs, licensing and IoT.  I thought it would be worthwhile, from time to time, to summarize some of the more thought-provoking ones.  I r

One of the reasons I am writing this blog is to try to inject some sanity back into the ever more convoluted arguments being made to justify a handful of entities making "gazillions" [1] of dollars, Euros and sometimes Yuans, from licensing FRAND committed SEPs at the expense of companies that develop and sell useful products.  Many of the arguments made by these SEP licensors are so removed from how things work in the real world that they seem ludicrous when applied to real

There was a lot of discussion about use cases during the Licensing Executive Society – Silicon Valley Chapter (“LES-SVC”) program titled “The Ubiquitous World of Internet of Things (IoT) Connected Devices – and the Coming Tsunami of Patent Licensing,” (“Program”). [1]   You might reasonably ask me, what is a use case?  As far as I can tell, it is something that SEP licensors have made up to justify charging more money, sometimes much more money, to license the same patents fo

I have been investigating how the large SEP licensors are targeting IoT next (now that their campaigns against handsets and connected cars are winding down [1] ).  So when a meeting notice popped up in my LinkedIn feed for a program put on by the Licensing Executive Society – Silicon Valley Chapter (“LES-SVC”), it caught my eye.  The program was titled “The Ubiquitous World of Internet of Things (IoT) Connected Devices – and the Coming Tsunami of Patent Licensing.”  The panel

I will never forget what a friend (who at the time was working for a grocery store chain) said to me a while back because it was such a sad indictment of our current SEP licensing system: “We sell tomatoes and we have seven patent cases.” Nearly all of those patent cases involved SEPs (or alleged SEPs).  Standards, particularly communications standards, are easy assertion targets:  a patent holder need only do one analysis (against the standard) and then simply determine whet

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

Certain companies, commentators and litigants and, unfortunately on occasion, government agencies repeat the following mantra: there needs to be “balance” between the interests of SEP owners and standard implementers in order to encourage standards development. This mantra includes the claim that innovative companies will not participate in standards development unless they are rewarded by the opportunity to make money through SEP licensing. [1] Yet, there is very little em

There is a persistent narrative in some quarters that you need to “balance” the needs of SEP holders and implementers [1] in order to encourage innovation and standards development. Their point seems to be that large numbers of innovative companies will not participate in standards development unless motivated by the ability to earn big bucks (or other currencies) from licensing their SEPs to implementers. This seems improbable: vanishingly few entities that do not plan to

When I arrived in New Zealand, I needed a phone that had a New Zealand phone number. I could have just bought a new SIM card and put it into my US phone. That is what my daughter did. Like most teenagers these days, she keeps in touch with her friends via Insta, Snap, etc. rather than by dialing or texting a telephone number. So, she was ok with having only a single phone in which she can use a New Zealand phone number when she is in NZ (via her NZ phone number SIM card)