Over the last few years competition authorities in the US and elsewhere have repeatedly warned about the risk of patent hold-up in the licensing of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs). Concerns about such risks were front and center in the recent FTC case against Qualcomm, where the Court ultimately concluded that Qualcomm had used a series of anticompetitive practices to extract unreasonable royalties from implementers. This post evaluates the evidence for such a risk, as well as the countervailing risk of patent hold-out.

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The courtroom trial in the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) antitrust case against Qualcomm ended in January with a promise from the judge in the case, Judge Lucy Koh, to issue a ruling as quickly as possible — caveated by her acknowledgement that the case is complicated and the evidence voluminous. Well, things have only gotten more complicated since the end of the trial. Not only did Apple and Qualcomm reach a settlement in the antitrust case against Qualcomm that Apple filed just three days after the FTC brought its suit, but the abbreviated trial in that case saw the presentation by Qualcomm of some damning evidence that, if accurate, seriously calls into (further) question the merits of the FTC’s case.

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It is not uncommon—in fact it is expected—that parties to a negotiation would have different opinions about the reasonableness of any deal. Every buyer asks for a price as low as possible, and sellers naturally request prices at which buyers (feign to) balk. A recent movement among some lawyers and economists has been to label such disagreements in the context of standard-essential patents not as a natural part of bargaining, but as dispositive proof of “hold-up,” or the innovator’s purported abuse of newly gained market power to extort implementers. We have four primary issues with this hold-up fad.

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An important but unheralded announcement was made on October 10, 2018: The European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) released a draft CEN CENELAC Workshop Agreement (CWA) on the licensing of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) for 5G/Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The final agreement, due to be published in early 2019, is likely to have significant implications for the development and roll-out of both 5G and IoT applications.

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Last week, the UK Court of Appeal upheld the findings of the High Court in an important case regarding standard essential patents (SEPs). Of particular significance, the Court of Appeal upheld the finding that the defendant, an implementer of SEPs, could have the sale of its products enjoined in the UK unless it enters into a global licensing deal on terms deemed by the court to be fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND). The case is noteworthy not least because the threat of an injunction of this sort has become increasingly rare in other jurisdictions, arguably resulting in an imbalance in bargaining power between patent holders and implementers.

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In an ideal world, it would not be necessary to block websites in order to combat piracy. But we do not live in an ideal world. We live in a world in which enormous amounts of content—from books and software to movies and music—is being distributed illegally. As a result, content creators and owners are being deprived of their rights and of the revenue that would flow from legitimate consumption of that content.

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The Internet is a modern miracle: from providing all varieties of entertainment, to facilitating life-saving technologies, to keeping us connected with distant loved ones, the scope of the Internet’s contribution to our daily lives is hard to overstate. Moving forward there is undoubtedly much more that we can and will do with the Internet, and part of that innovation will, naturally, require a reconsideration of existing laws and how new Internet-enabled modalities fit into them.

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I recently published a piece in the Hill welcoming the Canadian Supreme Court’s decision in Google v. Equustek. In this post I expand (at length) upon my assessment of the case.

In its decision, the Court upheld injunctive relief against Google, directing the company to avoid indexing websites offering the infringing goods in question, regardless of the location of the sites (and even though Google itself was not a party in the case nor in any way held liable for the infringement). As a result, the Court’s ruling would affect Google’s conduct outside of Canada as well as within it.

Read the full piece here. 

R Street’s Sasha Moss recently posted a piece on TechDirt describing the alleged shortcomings of the Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act of 2017 (RCSAA) — proposed legislative adjustments to the Copyright Office, recently passed in the House and introduced in the Senate last month (with identical language).

Read the full piece here.