FRAND determination can be a complex and challenging process riddled with technicalities that can make or break a deal, yielding long and often complex discussions, and in some cases, even litigation. It heavily relies on reaching a conclusion as to how much a particular SEP portfolio is worth and how each party valuates it. Yet somehow, two parties – the licensor and the licensee – need to find a way to align on how to valuate portfolios of thousands or tens of thousands of SEPs covering multiple generations of wireless technology.
The general lack of transparency about how a given SEP portfolio (numerator) relates to the overall number of SEPs (denominator) for a given standard makes it difficult to understand if a license offer is FRAND. Moreover, it is challenging to evaluate the value a patented standardized technology creates for the component or the final product. With increasing complexities – for example, licensing SEPs in new industry verticals outside of the smartphone world – valuating SEPs becomes a challenging task. This webinar has discussed the matter of transparency and valuation of SEPs in a panel of industry experts with regards to topics such as late SEP declaration, over declaration/ under declaration, SEP declaration policies across SSOs, SEP determination and missing information about patent essentiality, comparable SEP licenses as well as extensive NDAs preventing sharing information needed to determine FRAND. IPlytics hosts webinars as a neutral platform encouraging the open discussion about FRAND! The panel invited in this webinar shed light on the licensees’ point of views and experiences in FRAND negotiation and determination.
Panel:
- Kent Baker, ublox
- Benno Buehler, Charles River Associates
- Evelina Kurgonaite, Fair Standards Alliance
- David Lowenstein, Pearl Cohen
Moderated by Tim Pohlmann, CEO IPlytics
Kent Baker
Mr. Baker has over three decades of global business, technology, and intellectual property expertise working with patent holders, small patent implementers and globally developing standards, and regulatory and national intellectual property policies. He has served in key roles regarding R&D investment, identifying markets for “revolutionary” and “evolutionary” innovations, developing intellectual property as business assets, and driving monetization strategies at companies including the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC Xerox) and Qualcomm. His current role at u-blox AG, a Swiss based GNSS and wireless module manufacturer, provides a unique perspective of the patent licensing paradox experienced by startups, small and medium size companies needing fair and reasonably valued access to standard essential patents (SEPs) across various market segments. He knows both patent holder and patent implementor concerns and rhetoric.
Benno Buehler
Vice President at Charles River Associates. Previously, he was a senior member of the Chief Economist Team of the European Commission’s Directorate General for Competition (DG COMP). He started his career at an international management consultancy. With over a decade of competition policy experience, Benno did the economic analysis in a number of antitrust matters such as the Samsung and Motorola standard essential patent cases. He also shaped DG COMP’s economic assessment in several high profile horizontal and non-horizontal mergers, such as Qualcomm/NXP, Google/Motorola and others. He was also involved in a number of policy initiatives such as DG COMP’s review of the Technology Transfer Block Exemption Regulation. His experience covers a wide range of sectors, including high-tech, (mobile) telecommunications and broadband. His academic work has been published in scientific journals such as the Journal of Industrial Economics and the European Economic Review. Benno holds a PhD in Applied Microeconomics jointly from the University of Toulouse and from Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich.
Evelina Kurgonaitė-Swoboda
Evelina Kurgonaitė-Swoboda is the Secretary General at the Fair Standards Alliance – a Brussels-based association that advocates fairer licensing of standardised technology in the development and rollout of the IoT. Evelina previously served as Head of Policy Strategy and Legal Counsel at Samsung Electronics in Brussels. Evelina has 15+ years of experience in EU & competition law and public affairs. Having spent seven years in private practice – including at Sidley Austin and Morrison Foerster – Evelina established and managed the European arm of global news service PaRR, part of the Financial Times group at the time. Evelina holds LL.M from Helsinki University and MA from King‘s College London. Evelina is the founder and chair of Women AT (W@) – a platform that connects and promotes women professionals around the world.
David Loewenstein
David Loewenstein is a Partner in the Patent Litigation Group and Trademark and Design Litigation Group at Pearl Cohen Zedek Latzer Baratz LLP. in New York. He has over 30 years of patent and intellectual property litigation experience on all levels, from trial to appeal, and most recently in the ITC. He has litigated about 100 cases in about two-dozen U.S. States, involving a wide array of technologies from numerous multinational companies, such as software, wireless telecommunications, consumer goods, computer vision, forward collision avoidance, medical devices, automotive, biotechnology, nuclear magnetic resonance, chemical vapor deposition (“CVD”), electrochromic mirrors, and damages litigation. He started his career at Fish & Neave, which was the premier patent litigation firm at the time, which traced its roots back to Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers. While he was there he was a member of the Polaroid v. Kodak litigation team that won just under one billion dollars, following an eight-month trial. That award, which was paid, still stands as one of the largest patent awards in U.S. history. He also worked for Morgan & Finnegan, another venerable U.S. patent litigation boutique. David is also an arbitrator and mediator with the American Arbitration Association. David received a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and a Master’s of Science from Tufts University and Columbia University respectively, along with a JD from Fordham University, in New York City.
Tim Pohlmann
Tim Pohlmann is the CEO and founder of IPlytics. He earned his doctoral degree with the highest distinction from the Berlin Institute of Technology, with a dissertation on patenting and coordination in standardisation. He then went on to work as a post-doctoral researcher and consultant for the Law and Economics of Patents Group at CERNA, MINES ParisTech. Dr Pohlmann founded IPlytics with the vision of creating the first solution on the market to bring together comprehensive, highly indexed technical standards information, global patents, declared SEPs, patent pool and technical standards contribution data, to provide industry-leading analysis on the past, present and future of standards-essential technology. Unlike other tools that are overly complex, IPlytics provides fast, intuitive access to patents and standards to empower the user to strategically align patent portfolios to protect innovations and proactively engage in continuous strategic portfolio development as it relates to SEP assets, for initiatives such as licensing, acquisitions and joining patent pools, or simply to understand the respective positions of the competition.
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