SEP Essentials

In Andrew Myles’ guest post ( Convergence and Competition - A Tale of Two Standards Part 4 - Guest Post by Andrew Myles ), he discussed the six companies that have failed to provide a formal response to ISO’s request to confirm whether or not they will grant a FRAND license for their Wi-Fi 6 SEPs.  It’s time to take a deeper dive into some of those six companies.  To remind you, those six companies are: ·        Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. (“Huawei,” based out of China), · 

Way back when I first started this blog, I interviewed Andrew Myles  (see Interview with Andrew Myles - Part 1  and Interview with Andrew Myles - Part 2 ). As I noted in those posts, Andrew was a contributor to the IEEE 802.11 Working Group for more than twenty years and has also spent a great deal of time in recent years working to promote peaceful coexistence between Wi-Fi, cellular and other radio based telecommunications standards as the Chair of the IEEE 802.11 Coexisten

For years the cellular and Wifi standards peacefully co-existed with different uses (voice vs data) and different technological strengths (see, Convergence and Competition – A Tale of Two Standards Part 1 (the Early Years: Peaceful Co-Existence) ( sepessentials.com ) ).  But over time, the technologies used in the standards, and the applications for which the standards are used, have converged (see, Convergence and Competition – A Tale of Two Standards Part 2 (Convergence of

One of the regulatory agencies which has run amuck over the last several years is the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC).  The ITC was formed to protect U.S. domestic industries from unfair foreign competition.  But, at least in patent cases, it has strayed very far from that original mission.  Too often these days, the ITC lets foreign companies use the ITC against American companies in an end run around American courts.  American courts do not grant injunctions when

I keep musing on why a small set of American Senators, lead by Senator Chris Coons (Democrat from Delaware), is trying to make our country more like Germany.  I speak of course about the so-called RESTORE Act (see also my post The "RESTORE" Act which looks at the issues with the Act from a somewhat different perspective).  Foreign companies have been using the German legal system to extract unfair and unjust payments for FRAND committed SEPs from American (and other) compani

Several of my recent posts have focused on the third prong of standard and SEP analysis: the competition law aspects (see e.g. Back to Basics – An Overview of Competition Law, Standard Development and Standard Setting ).  The Chinese government also has been contemplating how SEP related issues should be addressed under the competition laws and has just released new Anti-Monopoly Guidelines for Standard Essential Patents ( Notice of the State Administration for Market Regulat