The Eastern District of Virginia recently dismissed SawStop’s suit against a number of table-saw and power-tool manufacturers, finding SawStop failed to sufficiently plead its antitrust and “standards conspiracy” claims.

As you may recall from our February 7, 2014 post, SawStop’s complaint alleged that the manufacturers collectively convinced Underwriters Laboratories, Inc. (“UL”) not to adopt

SanDisk brought suit against Round Rock Research in the District of Delaware last week, alleging that the patent assertion entity’s acquisition and enforcement of standard essential patents previously held by Micron Technology has violated federal and state antitrust laws and breached contractual commitments to license the patents on RAND terms. The action, Sandisk Corporation v.

Qualcomm and Nokia weighed-in on the Ericsson v. D-Link appeal yesterday, each filing amici curiae briefs with the Federal Circuit.  The parties’ positions favored the patent owner, though each adopted different approaches to the issues on appeal.  Qualcomm focused on the fact-specific contractual nature of RAND commitments that patent owners rely on based on an

A few weeks ago, the White House Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB)  proposed revisions to Circular A-119 entitled “Federal Participation in the Development and Use of Voluntary Consensus Standards and in Conformity Assessment Activities.”  In this post we provide an overview of OMB’s proposed 60+-page revised Circular A-119.

Last revised in 1998, Circular A-119

Late last week, the American Antitrust Institute submitted a very interesting petition to the U.S. Dept. of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission.  In the petition, which is titled “Request for Joint Enforcement Guidelines on the Patent Policies of Standard Setting Organizations,” the AAI urges these agencies to step up their enforcement of the antitrust laws with respect to SSOs themselves — not merely the participants in the standard-setting process.  To that end, the AAI requests that the FTC/DOJ (1) issue specific guidelines for what should be included in SSO patent policies, and (2) hold SSOs liable for not adopting procedural safeguards to prevent patent hold-up behavior.
Continue Reading American Antitrust Institute calls on FTC, DOJ to force standard-setting organizations to adopt more stringent patent policies