SEP Essentials

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

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

Whether described as a multiverse (the catch phrase of the day) or as an ecosystem (my preferred word), in order to accurately frame any discussion of SEP licensing, it is important to understand the three primary levels, as well as some of the many sublevels, of that ecosystem. [1]   This post is a deeper dive into the cellular ecosystem but, because that ecosystem is similar for many other telecommunications and networking standards, it also serves to inform discussion of t

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