Posts Tagged: "Licensing"

With a worldwide pandemic, a gyrating economy, an erratic stock market, turmoil in many of America’s largest cities and a high-stakes election, 2020 has been a tumultuous year. Apart from the obvious anxiety they cause, such events may trigger force majeure clauses in joint-development agreements and licensing agreements. To what extent should licensees compensate licensors who terminate licensing agreements based on instances of force majeure?

This is the second in a series of articles analyzing statements made by various entities in the cellular industry regarding licensing Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) on a Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) basis. The first article focused on statements relating to transparency. This article looks at statements regarding unconditional offers to license on a FRAND basis, arbitration of FRAND terms and conditions, specific FRAND rates, the application of such rates, and portfolio licensing.

In a previous article, we laid out the basics of “patent pools”, which license patents that are declared essential for technology standards. A recent article published in the University of San Diego Law Review, titled Glory Days: Do the Anticompetitive Risks of Standards-Essential Patent Pools Outweigh Their Procompetitive Benefits? (Glory Days), criticized patent pools, alleging inefficiencies and anticompetitive risks of pools for standard essential patents (SEPs). While the authors make several rebuttable suggestions, the crux of the authors’ complaints about SEP patent pools is that SEP pools should bear all the burdens and expenses of verifying with a litigation-grade level of certainty that all patents in the pool are essential and valid before an implementer will even engage in a licensing discussion with the pool. This approach is not economically or practically realistic and is designed to justify hold out and provide cover for implementers to refuse to engage in licensing discussions.

Implementers of standard essential technology such as Long-Term Evolution (LTE) are constantly attempting to reduce costs for implementation. This behavior has led to certain inefficiencies in the marketplace, such as innovators not being compensated for their contributions to technological standards. The symbiotic relationship between innovators and implementers cannot continue where one side takes all the risk and the other side reaps all the reward. One construct put in place by innovators to extract compensation from the marketplace are patent pools that license patents that are declared essential for technology standards.

At the onset of the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic in early March 2020, the legal community immediately became concerned about its economic prospects. Particularly in the intellectual property (IP) legal community, bad memories from the 2007-2009 mortgage crisis and Great Recession surfaced, and fears of losing clients, billable hours, and jobs mounted. However, due to a variety of factors, the legal market has been unexpectedly resilient and, in many ways, has thrived during these extremely uncertain times.

On October 5, the United States Supreme Court denied TCL Communication’s petition for certiorari in TCL Communication Technology Holdings Ltd. V. Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson. Of course, the issue wasn’t quite as simple or straight forward as TCL suggested. While Ericsson was under a FRAND obligation, TCL was engaging in infringing activities during a period in which they had no license to use the Ericsson patents. Thus, the threshold question was really whether the relief sought was equitable or legal in nature. The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in an opinion authored by Judge Raymond Chen and joined by Judges Pauline Newman and Todd Hughes, determined that the payment for past infringing activities sought a legal remedy requiring a jury trial under the Seventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court’s decision not to grant certiorari lets stand this decision.

In a ruling earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Virginia A. Phillips of the Central District of California granted partial summary judgment in favor of Onika Tanya Maraj, who performs rap under the stage name Nicki Minaj, resolving a copyright infringement dispute originally filed in 2018 by singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman over Minaj’s unauthorized use of Chapman’s 1988 single “Baby Can I Hold You.” In ruling that Minaj had established a fair use defense to Chapman’s copyright infringement claims, Judge Phillips affirmed the important role of experimenting with copyrighted works prior to licensing as a common practice within the recording industry.

Standards such as WiFi, GSM, 2G, 3G or 4G/LTE have been central to connecting the world. During the Covid-19 crisis, it was thanks to the technologies these standards enable that the global economy did not totally collapse. As we “zoomed” our way through self-isolation, the UK Supreme Court issued a landmark judgment, as reported by IPWatchdog. The decision addresses the cross-border enforcement of standard essential patents. Standard essential patents (SEPs) need to be addressed on FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms. FRAND aims at addressing anti-competitive conduct that can stem from matching patent law with standardization. Because these standards enable interconnectivity, they are of great importance.

Software is an extremely valuable good for those who produce it because it provides value to the software’s end users. That value, however, also makes it a target for those who would prefer to obtain the value without compensating the software producer. As a result, like with any valuable asset, software suppliers and Internet of Things (IoT) companies must implement safeguards to protect it. Since software is intellectual property, attorneys who work for or advise software producers (which, let’s be honest, is just about every technology company these days, given the addition of hardware manufacturers via the ubiquity of their “smart” devices to the existing desktop, mobile, and SaaS applications that we all use in both our personal and business lives), are frequently asked to advise on how to best protect this valuable asset. Unfortunately, as discussed below, most lawyers only deliver half of what they should.

During periods of widespread economic disruption such as the present, operating businesses must be able to identify and respond to threats to the financial health of their contracting counterparts in order to protect key company assets. For companies that license intellectual property from third parties, such as copyrights, trademarks or patents, the bankruptcy of a licensor could have a serious impact on the company’s ability to use those assets, which in turn could materially impair the value of the company assets or significantly hinder a company’s ability to serve its clients. This article will describe the consequences of bankruptcy on licensed intellectual property and outline steps licensees can take to protect their intellectual property rights in the face of a licensor’s insolvency.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit today vacated a decision of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California finding that Qualcomm had engaged in unlawful licensing practices and reversed a permanent, worldwide injunction against several of Qualcomm’s core business practices. In May 2019, Judge Lucy Koh issued a 233-page order finding that Qualcomm had engaged in unlawful licensing practices and ordered in part that Qualcomm “must make exhaustive SEP licenses available to modem-chip suppliers on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (“FRAND”) terms and to submit, as necessary, to arbitral or judicial dispute resolution to determine such terms…[and] submit to compliance and monitoring procedures for a period of seven (7) years.” Koh’s ruling was widely criticized, and today’s unanimous opinion was a total reversal of her findings.

On July 24, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) affirmed a decision of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas that a State asserting sovereign immunity could not be joined as an involuntary plaintiff, but dissented from the district court’s holding that the case could not proceed in the State’s absence. Gensetix, Inc. v. Baylor College of Medicine. Judges Newman and Taranto each wrote separately in partially dissenting from different aspects of the majority’s opinion.

Versatile video coding (VVC), also known as Future Video Coding (FVC) or H.266, is a video compression standard that was released on July 6 and is being positioned as the successor to High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC or H.265). CPA Global has reviewed the key aspects of the standard and factors which could impact its licensing and adoption and we have identified and analyzed the key patented technologies that have a possibility of being relevant to the VVC standard. The standard was in the process of being finalized at the time we conducted our analysis and we have therefore referred to Draft 8 of VVC, which was approved by JVET in the Brussels meeting from January 7-17, 2020.

The international economic disruption caused by COVID-19 presents unprecedented challenges. Thriving tech startup companies worth millions in January might find themselves struggling to stay afloat today. This article highlights the value of intellectual property (IP) that companies – particularly small companies without an IP department – can sometimes overlook in times of financial distress. The policy goals behind IP rights are at odds with the goals of bankruptcy law. Bankruptcy laws in the United States are “debtor friendly” and, in their most simplistic form, shield the party from certain debtors while forcing the sale of assets to pay other debts. But court ordered sales tend to undervalue complex property like IP. This is particularly apparent when it comes to patents.