Posts in Licensing

Sharing information about an invention is not an option. With patents, disclosure is a requirement which benefits the inventor, other inventors and society. When and how an invention is shared makes a huge difference. Disclosing information and sharing the right to practice it are not the same. The Patent Bay, a new patent platform from a Swedish company that believes some patent owners are hoarders, is looking to change how patents are shared and used.

On Monday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced that the agency has established a Standard-Essential Patent (SEP) Working Group to develop and deliver meaningful policy solutions on SEP-related issues. The working group, which will report to USPTO Director John Squires, will play a role in advancing the Office’s engagement with patent remedies and enforcement in furtherance of the pro-innovation stance the agency has taken on SEP cases before the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) and in U.S. district court.

Global litigation over standard essential patents (SEPs) is facing new strategies by implementers, mainly related to venue selection. There is an increasing risk of foreign decisions aimed at interfering with decisions on infringement of patents granted and issued in foreign jurisdictions – in clear tension with the territoriality principle. There is also a trend of abuse of process in the selection of venues within specific countries aimed at creating obstacles and delaying remedies and effective protection for national IP rights.

Reddit filed a lawsuit yesterday against artificial intelligence (AI) company Perplexity AI and three other defendants for their alleged illegal circumvention of Reddit security measures meant to protect misuse of its content and data. Reddit, which describes itself in the complaint as “one of the largest repositories of human conversation in existence,” likened the actions of Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy, and SerpApi to those of “would-be bank robbers.” Through their development of tools that bypass both Google’s and Reddit’s anti-scraping measures, and their scraping of Reddit content from Google search results, these defendants, “knowing they cannot get into the bank vault, break into the armored truck carrying the cash instead,” said the complaint.

“Royalty-free” is an appealing notion, especially when applied to the licensing of a patent essential to a standard. This standard is even more compelling to an implementer when every participant in the relevant standards body or proprietary consortia, including preeminent technology companies, has pledged it will grant its essential patents on a royalty free (RF) basis…. But is it the case that “royalty-free” applied to standard-essential patents (SEPs) is FRAND (fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory), but better? Today’s U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) doesn’t think so.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently proposed changing how the federal government funds scientific research at universities across the country. “I think if we fund it and [the universities] invent a patent, the United States of America taxpayer should get half” of the royalties when universities license those patents to private companies for further development, he suggested. Lutnick rightly wants to ensure that taxpayers get a good bang for their research buck. But the truth is, taxpayers already get a great return on the university research they fund. 

On October 7, a coalition of 25 experts in intellectual property and competition law who serve or have served as U.S. judges, U.S. government officials, legal scholars and economists submitted a comment to the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) as part of that agency’s Open Consultation on Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) in order to correct various misconceptions regarding SEPs that have arisen in both scholarly and political debates. The letter from IP and competition law experts underscores the lack of empirical evidence substantiating claims of patent holdup and royalty stacking and highlights cautionary tales from the European Commission’s recent failures to establish SEP rate determination procedures like those proposed by UKIPO.

The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a Statement of Interest on Monday in Disney Enterprises, Inc. v. InterDigital, Inc., et al., an antitrust case filed by Disney in August 2025 that alleged “abusive licensing practices,” monopolization of the video compression and streaming markets and Sherman Act violations by InterDigital. The DOJ’s statement opined that patents, including standard essential patents (SEPs), do not necessarily confer market power to the patentee.  

To say that we live in strange times doesn’t do justice to the absurdity of these days. Just as Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick was saying that the government should seize 50% of academic royalties resulting from licensing federally funded inventions because otherwise the feds get “zero” return, the Administration adopted Biden Administration guidelines that imperil the most successful patent licensing agency. 

The UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) launched a consultation on standard essential patents (“Consultation”) in July of this year, with the stated goal of creating “a more balanced system that works for everyone involved – from the innovators who create patented technologies to the businesses that use them to create products we all depend on.” And like the EC and aforementioned agencies of the United States government, the UKIPO takes up the mantle of protecting SME interests. While the Consultation, for the most part, seeks feedback on the solutions being proposed, analyzing the underlying problems purporting to be addressed is equally, if not more, important.

When functioning properly, intellectual property (IP) rights enable ideas to become legally recognized assets, which can then be collateralized or licensed to attract financing, thereby fueling investment, job creation and economic expansion. During the 2025 IPWatchdog Women’s IP Forum, I had the privilege of joining a distinguished panel to explore in depth how IP functions as an engine of economic growth in the United States and globally. My remarks focused on the central role of predictable IP rights in transforming innovation into economic output.

Yesterday, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick dropped a bombshell when asked by Axios about the next target after the government’s deals giving it 15% of Nvidia’s revenue from AI chips sold to China and plans to take a stake in U.S. Steel, which he said will be universities. While that might sound appealing on the surface, if put into practice, it’s much more likely to shoot American innovation in the foot than to create a promising source of government revenue.

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Friday, August 8, sent a letter to Harvard University President Alan Garber informing him that the U.S. government is planning to “march in” on its patents. Lutnick accused the institution of failing “to live up to its obligations to the American taxpayer” and being “in breach of the statutory, regulatory, and contractual requirements tied to Harvard’s federally funded research programs and intellectual property arising therefrom, including patents.” As a result, the Commerce Department will be “initiating an immediate comprehensive review of the compliance—or lack thereof—of Harvard’s federally funded research programs,” wrote Lutnick.

In a recent ruling with significant implications for patent licensing disputes, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s decision in Acorda Therapeutics, Inc. v. Alkermes Pharma Ireland Ltd., No. 2023-2374 (Fed. Cir. July 25, 2025), demonstrates just how critical proper jurisdictional framing is when contesting patent-related arbitration awards. The case reminds practitioners and stakeholders that even when patents sit at the heart of a dispute, the way a claim is framed can determine whether the matter will be heard by a federal court—or deflected into purely state law territory.