Judge Payne recently denied  defendant LG’s motion to exclude damages expert testimony on alleged standard essential patents (SEPs) where LG challenged the experts opinion (1) because he did not start with a royalty-rate that is then adjusted  by applying Georgia-Pacific factors and (2) because he failed to apportion value to the patented feature given his reliance on the end product price.  The patents-in-suit are alleged to be essential to the GSM, UMTS/HSPA and LTE cellular standards, but the parties disagreed whether the patents are SEPs and other patents-in-suit are not alleged to be SEPs.

The decision sheds some incremental insight on the entire market value rule (EMVR) that concerns when one can use the end product as the royalty base.  The court considered it a rule of evidence for U.S. jury trials to avoid jury confusion and found that the expert properly considered the end product price to assess profitability of the accused device, but otherwise did not rely on the end product as a royalty base.  He ruled that the expert may rely on that end product price in his analysis, but he cannot “publish” (i.e., disclose) that end product price to the jury given the EMVR’s “important evidentiary principle” that “care must be taken to avoid misleading the jury by placing undue emphasis on the value of the entire product” and concern that “diclosure of the end product’s total revenue cannot help but skew the damages horizon for the jury, regardless of the contribution of the patented component to this revenue.”
Continue Reading Judge Payne applies “important evidentiary principle” to preclude telling jury about end product price (Core Wireless v. LG)