SEP Essentials

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (“ETSI”) requires each SEP owner to agree to give an “irrevocable undertaking in writing that it is prepared to grant irrevocable licences on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (“FRAND”) terms and conditions . . .”  If a SEP owner refuses, the committee, in consultation with the ETSI Secretariat, is empowered to stop work on the applicable section of the standard. [1]   Similarly, in the Institute of Electrical and Elec

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,

I wanted to title this series of posts “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” in a homage to the spaghetti Western’s conception of the American West. However, these categories do not line up so clearly with the current state of the world’s most used SEP litigation jurisdictions.  Instead, I titled this series of posts “The Coherent, the Meh and the Left Behind.” These are more useful categories to describe the SEP policies of the most used—and top emerging—SEP litigation jurisdict

I first met Graham Bell during the Innovatio MDL litigation. [1]   Innovatio IP Ventures, LLC (Innovatio) had acquired patents from Broadcom Corporation (“Broadcom”) that, during the Innovatio litigation, were found to be essential to the Wi-Fi standard.  Innovatio sent thousands of letters to small businesses and mom and pop shops alleging that their use of Wi-Fi infringed those patents.  Innovatio demanded as much as $2,500 per location to use Wi-Fi and to provide (usually

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