SEP Essentials

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

The United States has an odd pattern of taking a giant step (or two) backwards just as the rest of the world is, finally, moving forward.  The so-called “RESTORE” Act is in that same unfortunate American tradition of trashing the present in order to step backwards to some mythical vision of a halcyon past, just as everyone else finally starts to see the wisdom of moving forward.  So, just as Germany is, finally, moving away from automatic injunctions in patent cases and towar

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

There is so much going on in the world of SEPs and SEP policy right now that it is hard to keep up.  So, in a departure from my normal deeper dive posts, today’s post is a summary of a few recent SEP related government actions. Implementation Roadmap for the U.S. government’s “National Standards Strategy for Critical and Emerging Technology ”   Just in time for this election cycle, the Biden-Harris administration has released the Implementation Roadmap [1]  for the U.S. Gover

I wanted to revisit the statements made by Qualcomm and Nokia representatives at the Global Standards Leadership Conference about aggregate cellular license amounts.  See my post Global Standards Leadership Conference - Part 3 ( sepessentials.com )  for additional details on what was said during the panel.  To set the stage, according to a report put out last year by IPLytics, one of the hosts of the conference, Qualcomm is ranked no. 2 (behind only Huawei) and Nokia no. 5 in

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