SEP Essentials

I have been writing about ZTE a lot recently in my mini-series about the ZTE/Samsung dispute. See, Courts That "FRAND" Differently: Part 1, Courts that “FRAND” Differently Part 2: Lessons To Be Learned and Courts That "FRAND" Differently Part 3. But, until my recent post about Avanci, I had forgotten that ZTE was a founding member of Avanci back in 2016. ZTE’s role in setting up Avanci in 2016 calls into question ZTE’s narrative in the Samsung cases that it, and thus its 2

My two previous posts in this series examined the tidbits that can be gleaned from the UK and Chinese cases in the ZTE/Samsung dispute, Courts That "FRAND" Differently: Part 1, and the first set of lessons that can and should be learned from them with a focus on structural problems (lessons 1-4), Courts that “FRAND” Differently Part 2: Lessons To Be Learned. This post also focuses on lessons that can and should be learned from the cases with a focus on FRAND licenses and “com

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

Recently, two different courts — the High Court of England and Wales (“UK Court”) and China’s Chongqing Intermediate People’s Court (“Chinese Court”) — opined on what a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) portfolio cross-license would be for the very same 5G cellular SEP portfolios.[1] They came to significantly different results: the UK Court decided the balancing payment from Samsung to ZTE should be about $392 million whereas the Chinese Court decided it should