Matteo Sabattini

On February 3, 2026, Sisvel took a significant step forward in advancing transparency through its collaboration with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). This initiative integrates verified SEP data into WIPO’s PATENTSCOPE platform, making it easier for users to access information about patents that have been identified as essential to the relevant standard through the mechanisms of Sisvel’s FRAND-based patent pools.

Patent licensing and technology transfer are cornerstones of modern economies, where the efficiencies of collaboration and division of labor do not require firms to be vertically integrated. The Wright brothers did not build commercial aviation, and yet commercial aviation was born thanks to the Wright brothers’ invention. Similarly, a car manufacturer can simply rely on communication technologies developed by telecom experts outside the automotive ecosystem to guarantee connectivity to its fleet and the corresponding massive economic benefits. This short article focuses on how risk – in the economic and legal sense – changes over time, and what this implies for patent licensing dynamics. Licensing negotiations are not static snapshots in time, they often evolve and change according to developing circumstances, case law, parties’ conduct, and many other factors.

In recent years, several patent experts and commentators have claimed that there are too many “low-quality” patents being granted by patent offices around the world, or that a large percentage of patents are often found invalid by courts and judges. Until a patent is found to be invalid by a court or another tribunal, during licensing negotiations both licensor and licensee can only consider the likelihood that such patent is eventually found invalid based on the incomplete information available to them. Similarly, it has been claimed that a patent-by-patent analysis of a large patent portfolio could determine, without any uncertainty, whether a portfolio is infringed or standard essential. For example, several studies have been published or presented in courts that try to determine which patents in a portfolio are “truly” essential….. A better model, in the author’s opinion, is a probabilistic model that tries to estimate the likelihood of a portfolio to be infringed, valid and/or essential.

Never more than in this past year has reflection and introspection been important to cope with the isolation and stress brought by a raging pandemic. As I look back at World IP Day last year, I immediately recognize how much we have learned and evolved since the beginning of this aggressive and deadly disease. In little more than a year, the outlook is significantly more positive: vaccines are being rolled out in vast quantities, their effect in curbing infections and deaths starts to be recognized, the economy is showing signs of recovery, schools are reopening and there is finally more optimism.

Survival bias permeates today’s tech world, especially the Silicon Valley, in the celebration of failure as a sine qua non for success, almost as a virtue, a badge of honor. Praise, acclaim and visibility are given to companies that were started in a garage and are now multi-million-dollar public corporations. As if starting from a garage is some sort of a predictor of future success. Unfortunately, we often forget about the many more companies that started from a garage and are still in a garage, or do not exist anymore. The celebration of those “who made it” and how they made it (often praising their multiple failures) does not take into account those who failed and did not make it.