SEP Essentials

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 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

The U.K.’s Supreme Court (“Court”) recently issued a decision in the case Tesla filed against InterDigital and Avanci (“Decision”).[1] As is so often the case in FRAND disagreements, this dispute has a long and tangled history with cases filed in multiple different jurisdictions. This post focuses on the U.K. lawsuit. The underlying UK case was filed by Tesla seeking a FRAND determination for a world-wide license to the cellular patents managed by Avanci in the Vehicle Lic

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 ended my last post with the following quote from the UK Court in Samsung v. ZTE: “this profusion of litigation is a symptom of a dysfunctional system . . .”[1] In response to the ever increasing problem of too much litigation and to these internecine jurisdictional fights, several entities and government organizations have formed “working groups” to review and evaluate how to make FRAND determinations outside the court system. The World Intellectual Property Organization