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Today, the Supreme Court declined to overrule its prior decision in Brulotte v. Thys Co., 379 U.S. 29 (1964), and maintained its ruling that a patent holder cannot charge royalties for the use of his invention where the use occurs after the patent term has expired.  The Supreme Court held that stare decisis…

Last Thursday, December 5, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 3309 (“the Innovation Act”), a patent reform bill generally directed to perceived patent litigation abuse by certain patent assertion entities (what some call “patent trolls”).  Prior draft versions of the House bill had gone through several revisions in the past few months (see our September…

Last month, we briefly discussed an article that proposed that “baseball-style” arbitration be used to resolve FRAND licensing disputes.  The following guest post about this article was authored by David Balto, a former Policy Director of the Bureau of Competition for the Federal Trade Commission who currently has his own public interest antitrust practice here in Washington, DC.  David’s views expressed below are his own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the authors of The Essential Patent Blog, Dow Lohnes PLLC, or Dow Lohnes’s clients.

Baseball has the Best Rules:  Using Arbitration to Solve FRAND Disputes

How to calculate Fair, Reasonable and Nondiscriminatory (FRAND) royalties seems like one of the most intractable problems firms, standard setting organizations and the courts are grappling with.   No wonder, there is sparse authority and relatively few litigated cases.

Two of the most thoughtful scholars on antitrust intellectual property issues — Professors Mark Lemley and Carl Shapiro — have weighed in and issued a paper outlining an interesting solution to the FRAND licensing problem and it provides a clarion call for how to grapple with the problem.Continue Reading Baseball has the Best Rules: Using Arbitration to Solve FRAND Disputes

This afternoon, the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet held a hearing titled “Abusive Patent Litigation: The Issues Impacting American Competitiveness and Job Creation at the International Trade Commission and Beyond.”  This hearing comes on the heels of a broader hearing on abusive patent litigation held by the same committee two months ago, as well as a different hearing in July 2012 that generally addressed the ITC’s role in deciding patent disputes.  Several witnesses representing a variety of diverse backgrounds and interests testified today before the subcommittee, including:

  • Kevin Rhodes, VP and Chief IP Counsel for 3M Innovative Properties Co.
  • Jon Dudas, Former Director of the USPTO (and a member of the board of non-practicing entity MOSAID Technologies)
  • Prof. Colleen Chien of Santa Clara University
  • Russell Binns, Associate General Counsel for IP Law & Litigation at Avaya
  • Deanna Tanner Okun, Former Chairwoman of the ITC (and a partner at Adduci Mastriani & Schaumberg)
  • David Foster, Chairman of the Legislative Committee for the ITC Trial Lawyers Association (and a partner at Foster, Murphy, Altman & Nickel)

A link to the video webcast of the full hearing is available at the House Judiciary Committee’s website, along with PDFs of each witness’s prepared testimony.  Our friends at Patent Progress also live-tweeted the event — take a look at their Twitter feed @PatentProgress for their blow-by-blow account.

As we anticipated, while standard-essential patents were not the focus of this particular hearing, the issue of SEPs was indeed given some attention.  In his opening remarks, Congressman Melvin Watt noted concerns some have expressed about the potential for improper usage of standard-essential patents in seeking injunctive relief, and Congressman Ted Poe briefly quizzed Prof. Chien about the propriety of asserting standard-essential patents in the ITC. 
Continue Reading House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on abusive patent litigation and the ITC focuses on non-practicing entities, litigation costs, and remedies

[UPDATE]  Since this post was originally published on January 22, the deadline passed for the parties to submit extrinsic evidence and additional arguments supporting their respective interpretations of the Google-MPEG LA AVC/H.264 license agreement.  Microsoft submitted both a brief and a supporting Declaration of Lawrence A. Horn, who is the President and CEO of MPEG LA, LLC.  Mr. Horn’s declaration supports Microsoft’s argument (as detailed in our original post below) that the scope of the grant-back under the MPEG LA license agreement extends to all Affiliates of Google, not just to those specifically identified.  For its part, Motorola argues that the “scope” language of the MPEG LA agreement remains ambiguous, and that Mr. Horn’s declaration represents inadmissible hearsay because Motorola was unable to cross-examine him.

The parties’s respective briefs and Mr. Horn’s declaration may be accessed from the links below:

[/UPDATE]

Judge Robart’s forthcoming opinion in the Microsoft v. Motorola RAND breach of contract case in the Western District of Washington is highly anticipated by those who pay attention to standard-essential patent disputes, as it will likely provide a judicially-sanctioned roadmap for how to determine RAND terms and conditions in a given licensing situation.  But before he issues a written decision, a hearing is scheduled for January 28, during which Judge Robart will hear oral argument from Microsoft and Motorola regarding the implications that Google’s AVC/H.264 patent pool license agreement with MPEG-LA may have on the appropriate RAND terms for Motorola Mobility’s H.264-essential patent portfolio. (Google, of course, being the parent company of Motorola Mobility since it acquired Motorola in May 2012).


Continue Reading Preview: Motorola, Microsoft set to debate relevance of Google’s MPEG LA license agreement to RAND terms next week