Comments on: Patent licensing – House of cards.

By: Tatilsever

Tatilsever — Thu, 09 Apr 2015 23:24:17 +0000

Motorola’s patents regarding MPEG4 and WiFi may be more valuable than most, but it is highly likely that there are uncountably many other patented ideas just as valuable that goes into laptop, especially from companies that actively work on making and selling products, which need to deal with problems big and small on a daily basis to get these gadgets work smoothly. That would eat up the cost of a whole laptop ASP pretty quickly just based on IP, leaving nothing for the actual hardware, transport, retail or marketing. When a company demands such “obviously too high” fee, I have no problem with courts presuming breach of FRAND.

The perceived value of SEP and non-SEP patents have taken a big hit by the puny settlements the titans of the smartphone industry were able to extract from each other in the last few years. The judgement of the courts may get colored by those developments.

By: windsorr

windsorr — Thu, 09 Apr 2015 07:12:38 +0000

Hi Tim. Yes that is the case. I over generalized a bit for sake of simplicity, The whole SEP think is a horrible mess that warrants a much longer investigation and report, One day!

By: Tim Nash

Tim Nash — Wed, 08 Apr 2015 08:00:41 +0000

‘Because SEPs are always included within a standard, anyone who makes a product that uses that technology invariably infringes that IPR.’

As was seen in the Apple-Samsung litigation, there are patents which are claimed to be SEP which a product conforming to the standard does not infringe – typically a product only needs to use about 30% of SEPs to be standard conforming. Currently there is an incentive, for companies involved in setting the standard, to throw weak relevant patents into the pot to reduce their own cross licence fees.