Today, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit affirmed the judgment that Ericsson’s licensing offers to HTC on 2G, 3G and 4G standard essential patents (SEPs) based on the mobile device price (rather than the price of the baseband processor component inside the mobile device) complied with Ericsson’s ETSI commitment to license SEPs on fair,

Last week, Judge Gilstrap ruled that Ericsson’s end-product-based “offers to HTC–$2.50 or 1% with a $1 floor and a $4 cap per 4G device–were fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory.”  Judge Gilstrap found that the comparable licenses presented by Ericsson to be “the best market-based evidence” of the value of Ericsson’s standard essential patents (SEPs) and that “the market evidence, in the form of comparable licenses, has failed to embrace HTC’s preferred SSPPU [smallest salable patent-practicing unit] methodology.”    He noted that there was no evidence that industry licenses are negotiated based on the cost of a baseband chip (the alleged smallest saleable patent practicing unit or SSPPU) and evidence showed that the value of SEPs can exceed the value of the chip, which price does not include the cost if that intellectual property.  This SEP cases is one of the closest to capturing what actually happens in the licensing market with FRAND-committed SEPS, rather than generating new litigation-based theories on valuing SEPs (e.g., top-down analysis).  This decision also is at odds in many respects with the decision by Judge Selna in the TCL v. Ericsson case that currently is on appeal at the Federal Circuit (see our Jan. 3, 2018 post summarizing that decision).
Continue Reading Judge Gilstrap rules Ericsson’s licensing offers were FRAND-compliant (HTC v. Ericsson)

A couple weeks ago, we posted about an interesting pretrial damages ruling in a patent infringement case (actually, several cases) brought by non-practicing entity Wi-LAN against a number of standards-compliant device makers (Sony, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, and HTC).  But yesterday, an Eastern District of Texas jury decided that the damages issue was irrelevant, finding that all

Over the past few years, courts have begun cracking down on improper damages theories.  The Federal Circuit’s 2012 opinion in LaserDynamics v. Quanta is instructive on this point, noting that in the absence of evidence that the patented functionality is the source of the demand for the entire product, then damages must be based on

On Friday, January 4, 2013, a non-practicing entity named Steelhead Licensing LLC filed a litany of SEP-related lawsuits in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware against various wireless device manufacturers and cellular carriers.  Each of the entities is accused of infringing a single, soon-to-expire (on Feb. 13) patent — U.S. Pat. No. 5,491,834, entitled “Mobile Radio Handover Initiation Determination.”
Continue Reading Steelhead Licensing LLC files suit claiming wireless equipment makers and cellular carriers infringe cellular-essential patent