Posts Tagged: "Licensing"

Nearly every operating company valued at greater than $20 billion in market capitalization is likely to be accused of patent infringement at some point. The high likelihood of utilizing another person or company’s patented technology led to an explosion of patent litigation activity over the last 30 years. Often, inventions emerge without a specific product in mind, and the strategy for the invention-turned-patent lacks a clear vision. This has been the way of invention since the patent offices were first formed and legal IP protection became a constitutionally ordained government program.

A panel on day one of IPWatchdog LIVE 2026 didn’t mince words: the voluntary patent licensing ecosystem is functionally broken, and the IP community needs to understand why. That was the diagnostic consensus from the panel titled Patent Dealmaking, Monetization & Licensing: An Examination of Capital, Risk, and Deal Flow, moderated by Brian O’Shaughnessy (Dinsmore & Shohl) and featuring Michael Gulliford (Soryn IP Capital), Louis Carbonneau (Tangible IP), and Dan Kesack (WTW Insurance).

A British consumers’ organization has withdrawn its competition claim against Qualcomm after it determined the Competition Appeal Tribunal was likely to find Qualcomm was not at fault.    The consumers’ organization, Which?, filed the claim in February 2021 on behalf of around 29 million British consumers, alleging that Qualcomm had “breached UK competition law by taking advantage of its dominance in the patent-licensing and chipset markets.”

In 1924, several changes were wrought to the format of the Olympic Games that remain permanent features more than a century later as the 2026 Winter Olympics take place in Milan Cortina. That year featured the first lodging for athletes in what would become the Olympic Village, the first radio broadcasts of live Olympic events, and the first edition of the Winter Olympics as a separate event for the summer games. Figure skating events were among the games introduced at the 1924 Winter Olympics in Chamonix, France, and a century later, the international competition has been roiled by a series of copyright authorization issues leaving some skaters scrambling to change their routine and avoid infringement liability.

As the AI revolution accelerates and continues to reshape traditional business models, it has triggered a cascade of new legal, regulatory and policy challenges. At the forefront of these emerging issues are a growing number of high-stakes legal battles between content creators and major Generative AI (GenAI) companies behind large language models (LLMs). This article examines key legal themes and critical questions arising from recent developments at the intersection of AI and Copyright law.

On January 22, the Human Artistry Campaign, on behalf of a broad cross-section of the American creative community, launched a new advocacy campaign, titled “Stealing Isn’t Innovation.” The campaign’s core message is a direct protest against the “illegal mass harvesting of copyrighted works” by large technology companies to build and train their Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) platforms.

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.

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.

“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.