SEP Essentials

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

I recently posted about 5G, Stagnation and Innovation ( sepessentials.com ) , and wanted to take a deeper dive into one of the issues that was buried in my footnotes. In particular, I am still floored by the number of patents claimed to be essential to the 5G standard, particularly given that 5G is essentially a mashup of previously existing technologies with some tinkering and updates around the edges. I can only conclude that the 5G patent space (and maybe the 5G standard

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