SEP Essentials

In its “FRAND” Guidelines (“guidelines”), the Schoen Court made a lot of mistakes in its baseline assumptions, its legal analysis and its conclusions. It even made a number of mistakes in its citations. One of those mistakes occurs in paragraph 6 of the guidelines where the Schoen Court complains that the European Commission’s amicus curiae briefs in the proceedings that led to the Federal Court of Justice’s (“BGH”) “FRAND Objection III” decision (BGH KZR 10/25, GRUR 2026, 3

Earlier this year, Judge Schoen (in)famously stated publicly that the 7th Civil Chamber of the Munich Court was unable to make FRAND determinations. He said: “we think it is not possible to determine a FRAND rate” (see We are Incapable of Making FRAND Determinations Say More UPC and German Judges). Despite admitting to being unable to make a FRAND determination in any particular case, the Schoen Court recently released SEP guidelines (“guidelines”) that make far reaching de

How did the myth that standard development is more important than implementation come to be such a dominant force in certain legal circles? Case in point: Judge Schöen and his cohorts (Judges Schweyer and Tözsér) of the 7th Civil Chamber of the Munich Regional Court (“Schoen Court”) recently released so-called FRAND Guidelines (“guidelines”) for cases in their court.[1] There are so many things wrong with the guidelines and the assumptions underpinning them that I am awardi

I recently posted about how two different courts –the High Court of England and Wales (“UK Court”) and China’s Chongqing Intermediate People’s Court (“Chinese Court”) – reached vastly different conclusions on the value of a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (“FRAND”) portfolio cross-license for the same set of cellular SEP portfolios.[1] I originally wanted to title this series “Courts That Can’t Math.” I changed the title, however, to Courts That "FRAND" Differently b

I recently attended the IPBC/IAM Live conference in Paris, where judges from both the Unified Patent Court (UPC) and a German court shared their perspectives on standard-essential patent (SEP) litigation. A consistent theme emerged from these discussions: neither the UPC nor Germany is equipped to make real FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) determinations. Florence Butin, President of the Court of First Instance of the UPC and herself a UPC judge, noted that th

Here are the answers to the quiz. The first set of cases was the dispute between Microsoft and Motorola, the second the IPCom litigation with Lenovo and the third the Conversant/Huawei dispute. The jurisdictions and why they are outliers are as follows. Jurisdiction 1 – the United States . Patent damages in the United States, including for SEPs, usually are much higher than anywhere else in the world. The US is also a very large market for consumer based standardized prod