The Aqua Communication WG closely follows the regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on standard essential patents and amending Regulation (EU) 2017/1001.
The Aqua team provides members with information around this topic.
Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) are patents that protect a technology to fulfil an industry standard. SEPs are “essential” in the sense that the patented invention must be used (implemented) in products to comply with a technical standard and there is no alternative to using SEPs.
Unfortunately, the SEP licensing process is not efficient and needs more transparency and structure. Key issues are high licensing transaction costs and uncertainty about the SEP royalty. For example, implementers cannot assess their SEP exposure and SEP owners complain about long and expensive negotiations.
For implementers, there is limited information on who owns SEPs and it is not certain that all patents sought to be licensed are really necessary (essential) to implement a standard. In addition, there is little information on SEP license fees (FRAND royalty), so implementers with little or no expertise or resources find it impossible to assess the reasonableness of a SEP owner’s royalty demand.
A good summary of our work can be found here “Stagnation of the European smart meter roll out”, published in the magazine gwf Gas + Energie 01-02 2024, pp. 67-70, January 2024”.