Reverse Patent Pools and Other TTBER Tall Tales
In standard-essential patent (SEP) licensing, every procedural tweak is also a skirmish over bargaining power. That is what makes licensing negotiation groups (LNGs) more than an obscure acronym in the European Commission’s 2026 Technology Transfer Block Exemption Regulation (TTBER) and accompanying Guidelines (TTGs). LNGs would allow technology implementers to bargain collectively with rights holders. Depending on whom you ask, that is either a sensible way to reduce transaction costs—or a buyer cartel with a compliance memo.
The draft TTGs introduced a dedicated section on LNGs and, more notably, offered a soft antitrust safe harbor. In practice, qualifying LNGs would have avoided a full case-by-case assessment if they satisfied a defined set of conditions.
That approach did not come out of nowhere. A few months earlier, the European Commission signaled its position in an informal guidance letter issued jointly with the German competition authority, addressing the creation of the Automotive Licensing Negotiation Group.
That episode sets the stage for this post. It begins by situating LNGs within the broader SEP debate. It then examines the competition-law risks they raise, the limits of analogizing them to patent pools, and their uneasy fit with the Huawei framework.
Finally, it turns to the final TTGs. While the Commission dropped the proposed safe harbor, it kept a dedicated section on LNGs—raising the obvious question: was the intervention worth it?