NIPC News

Shanghai Licence CC9.10   Source Wikimedia Common s   Jane Lambert On 19 Dec 2021, I announced the Intellectual Property Office's consultation on standard essential patents and innovation.   The consultation closed on 1 March 2022 and a Summary of Responses to the Call for Views  has been published.   The summary covers the following topics: Section 1 - The balance of the ecosystem and benefits to innovation and consumers Section 2 - Competition and market functioning Section 3 - Transparency Section 4 – Patent infringement and remedies Section 5 – Licensing of SEPs Section 6 -SEP Litigation A list of respondents appears on page 88 of the summary. They include academics. businesses, law firms. patent attorneys and interest groups.  Contributions came from within the UK and beyond. The IPO seems to have received a wide range of views, some of which diverged widely. In view of the breadth of issues and the divergence of the views on the need for gov...

Intellectual Property Office Crown Copyright 2007 Open Government Licence v3.0   Jane Lambert One of the talks that I gave at the Cambridge IP Law Winter School  was "TMT: A SEP and FRAND Overview".    I did not choose that title so I shall try to explain what I think it means.   "TMT" stands for technology, media and telecoms. TMT is a sector where there has been a lot of litigation about "SEPs".  SEPs are "standard-essential patents", that is to say, patents for inventions that a telecoms equipment manufacturer has to use if it is to implement a technical standard.  Technical standards are set by standards-setting organizations ("SSOs"). An important SSO for mobile communications is the European Telecommunications Standards Institute ("ETSI") .   "FRAND" is short for "fair", "reasonable" and "nondiscriminatory" and refers to the terms on which SEP owners are supposed to license the use...