Measuring value and royalty costs in standards and SEPs passed along the value chain to consumers

An economist in the audience asked my panel on “transparency” at the Patents in Telecoms and the Internet of Things conference in London recently about achieving this by demanding detailed company financial disclosures. This is my first of two articles on topics in my wheelhouse that were addressed at this superlative biennial event. 

Rough judgments

Companies are generally unwilling to reveal such accounting figures that would help show how royalty costs are passed on and where profits are generated. Furthermore, some major value transfers are non-monetary and would not show up in these measures. Nevertheless, it is possible to surmise where most economic value is generated, captured or passed through, and where royalty costs are passed on in supply chains to customers.

Aggregate royalties paid of around five percent of handset revenues are very modest in comparison to total value in standards and the consumer welfare derived by several billion people using devices such as smartphones for many useful purposes.

Most of the value created in technology standards such as 4G and 5G is passed through to consumers. How much and where the rest of it is harvested across the supply chain and in the broader ecosystem is more complex and subtle.

Royalties paid and passed on can have a significant bearing on the financial performance of individual companies where competitors are paying and absorbing different amounts.

My analysis here includes some unashamedly qualitative assessments, as well as my usual quantitative support. But first, some definitions and background.

Economic pie sharing

Economists describe value created, for example, from technology innovation, as a total “surplus” that’s divided between producers and consumers. Producer surplus is obtained where the price received is higher than the minimum at which the producer is willing to sell. Consumer surplus is where the price paid is lower than the maximum the consumer is willing to pay. However, in the real world, it’s more complicated than this binary split with various different players in the ecosystem benefiting from standards such as 4G and 5G including standard-essential patents (SEPs).

Those who derive value from standards including SEPs, and share the total surplus include patent licensors, device OEMs, device ODMs (i.e. contract manufacturers), network equipment OEMs,  MNOs and MVNOs (i.e. physical and virtual mobile network operators), Big Tech Internet platforms and software publishers as well as end-users. Suppliers that generate no more than their cost of capital might be regarded as not capturing surplus, but superior returns and deficient returns can be generated in various ways. Reasons that possibly explain weak or strong profitability include (in)efficiency and other business activities. For example, Apple is by far the most profitable smartphone OEM and has accounted for between 70 percent and 80 percent of total handset profits over many years because it has a lot going for it. It is a more specific empirical question to what extent its superior returns result from it paying less than economic value or harvesting surplus in other ways in use of the cellular standards including SEPs.

Upstream creation, downstream consumption

Communications standards such as 4G and 5G are enormously valuable overall. This is resoundingly indicated by more than five billion mobile phone users (i.e. unique subscribers) and with rapid uptake of new standards. In addition to using mobile devices for calling and text messaging, with the vast majority of devices now being smartphones these are the primary or only means of accessing the Internet for most of these people. For a large and increasing proportion of them, these devices are also the dominant means of receiving news, sharing photos, paying for purchases, navigating and even watching video.

Some of the surplus created by standard-technology developers is retained or used to subsidize product business in network equipment or devices; but most of it flows to consumers within a few years of new technologies becoming commercially available. In between, a few major OEMs are likely retaining significant surplus. However; most OEMs and ODMs that are paying their dues in patent licensing fees are probably not keeping much of the surplus at all. Various Over-The-Top (OTT) players are taking significant value indirectly—in competition with MNOs and in information exchange barter trading with consumers, as explained below.

Fruits of competition and dominance

Vigorous competition bringing innovation and rapidly-declining quality-adjusted prices has delivered exceptional growth in new higher-performance services and network traffic growth. By the mid-2000s, unsubsidized new mobile phones could be purchased in most nations for under $50 and for as little as $20 in developing nations. By 2010, around half the world’s population had a mobile phone. Now, for example, there are plenty of 4G Android smartphone models on sale in India in the price range of RS5,000 to RS10,000 ($55 to $110) that include at least 4GB of RAM, front and rear cameras and 6 inch or larger displays that can stream video and deliver location-based services. Consumer surplus is clearly high in use of these, despite the relatively low willingness or ability to pay much higher prices in nations with modest income-per-capita such as India.

Meanwhile, the prices of high-end smartphones have increased. For example, many consumers happily pay more than $1,000 for various iPhone and Android models. Apple thus appears to be deriving significant producer surplus. While much of that arises from its strong brand, favored designs and manufacturing cost control, it also seems likely that a significant proportion of that is from standards-based technologies, after its payment of SEP royalties. It’s notable from recent FRAND decisions in the UK (i.e. in Interdigital v. Lenovo and Optis v. Apple) that large OEMs—such as Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi and Huawei—paying royalties in large lump sums up-front spend relatively low amounts per unit, and as percentages of unit selling prices, in comparison to many smaller OEMs paying running royalties. The larger OEMs are evidently receiving deep discounts of up to 80% for volume and prepayment.

In comparison to Apple and Samsung, most handset OEMs are in a rather more commoditized (i.e. less product-differentiated) and price-competitive market segment. Marginal costs also tend to be passed on to customers in the latter, but with little scope to increase prices much above costs no matter what goodies become available (to all) in the standards. The contract manufacturer ODMs also operate on thin margins. While owing their existence to the new technologies that fuel handset market growth and replacement, most manufacturers do not appear to be making exceptional profits in doing so.

Even some major OEMs have failed financially in the face of competition, regardless of ever-improving and increasingly valuable standards. It’s notable that despite Nokia being the handset market leader commanding the vast majority of the sector’s profits in the 2000s, and with peak financial performance around 2008, the firm’s floundering smartphone business at the beginnings of the 4G era was divested to Microsoft in 2014 and then subsequently closed with declining sales a couple of years later. With LG’s market share falling from 9% to 2% during the 2010s, it stopped selling smartphones in 2021.

All being things equal, one would expect costs including royalties to be fully passed on by suppliers in their prices. One would also expect that prices could be elevated little more—despite standard-technologies creating more total surplus than is paid for them in royalties—due to fierce downstream price competition among OEMs. Given the many competing suppliers at the commodity end of the market, one way a supplier might retain substantial supplier surplus would be if that company was avoiding royalty payments (e.g. through hold-out) while its competitors were incurring those costs and passing them on to customers. Alternatively, if that supplier was the only one, or if few are, paying such royalties, it might be unable to fully pass-on such costs to its customers without diminishing its sales volumes and market share.

Quid pro quos

MNOs and MVNOs do not pay directly to use the standards or SEP technologies that have kept them competitive in generating their service revenues. Instead, MNOs pay for new standards-based technologies in their network equipment purchases that are licensed with payment of patent fees by the manufacturers. MNOs and MVNOs commonly subsidize consumer purchases of new handsets that also employ these manufacturer-licensed technologies.

The fortunes of MNOs worldwide vary significantly: however, with a few exceptions such as US market leaders AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile in recent years, profitability is generally modest or meagre. For example, Vodafone and 3 in the UK are hoping their proposed merger will improve lacklustre financial performance in competition with two other MNOs.

While some MNOs may have been able to capture some of the economic surplus in 4G and 5G, it seems that the MNOs and MVNOs overall are not major hoarders of surplus. Instead, consumers benefit, for example, by getting more and more data for around the same expenditure as for much less data previously. While global MNO revenues have been rather flat over many recent years, MNOs are supplying exponential network traffic growth of 1,000x over fifteen years since 2010. Fierce competition among operators is causing all the cost-per-gigabyte reductions and increased value MNOs receive from technological improvements to be passed through downstream to consumers with an unrewardingly constant unitary elasticity in the market demand curve.

In contrast, Big Tech Internet platforms are making money hand over fist in comparison to most MNOs, even though surging mobile data now accounts for almost 60% of all Internet traffic. Google (Android, Google Play Store, YouTube), Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) and Apple (iOS and App Store) are indirectly appropriating some of the surplus generated by standards and SEPs. For example, as WhatsApp is free for end-users, it cannibalizes the higher profits mobile operators could otherwise make on picture messaging, international calls and roaming calls. Even though consumers pay for mobile data so they can use this app, MNOs’ supplier surplus is diminished by these substitution effects. And, there’s is no free lunch for consumers: the Faustian bargain in using WhatsApp is in allowing Meta to access personal phone contact information. Consumer surplus is thus diminished and Meta’s supplier surplus is increased by this payment made in-kind.

Big Tech is also taking significant slices of the surplus from OEMs. For example, when you browser search or ask Siri for an Internet search on your iPhone it uses Google’s search engine. Payments by Google to Apple, to be the default search engine on iPhones, reportedly accounts for 14 to 21 per cent of Apple’s profits.  Payments were expected to be between $18 billion and $20 billion annually by 2021. That’s not all economic surplus from the value of communications standards and SEPs, but a significant proportion of it surely is given that Google, like Meta, also harvests value from consumers’ personal information including use—such as location—of mobile devices.

And, what about the SEP licensors who also develop the standards in the first place? Some of them are probably obtaining some producer surplus and using it to support their complementary product businesses in communications processor chips, network equipment and devices. Nevertheless, with aggregate royalties paid only around five percent of handset revenues, a much lower percentage when also including MNO and mobile OTT revenues and declining over the last decade, the remaining surplus passed through downstream in a vibrant and innovative ecosystem where almost everyone now is a major consumer is much, much more.

Keith Mallinson, founder of WiseHarbor, has more than 25 years of experience in the telecommunications industry as a research analyst, consultant and testifying expert witness.

European policies for competition and growth in ICT through regulation of Big Tech, network operators and standard-essential technology licensing

 Big Tech companies have profited greatly from dominant market positions while riding largely for free over the top of fixed and mobile telecom networks and devices. The entire Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) ecosystem is enabled by a variety of interoperability technologies including 5G cellular, WiFi and HEVC/H.265 video compression that are openly available in published standards and embedded in components and end-products. How much, if anything, should beneficiaries pay for the capabilities upon which their standard-based implementations are built?

There are great expectations that technology and market developments will provide yet more stellar economic growth and improved consumer welfare in ICT with new innovations in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the metaverse (e.g. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)) and the Internet of Things (IoT). This is a high stakes game with some players having fared rather better than others as computing, communications, applications and Internet-based services have advanced over the last couple of decades. Big Tech companies continue growing handsomely to command a large and ever-increasing proportion of total ecosystem revenues, as I have noted here before.

European policies to regulate ICT markets in various ways that will redistribute rewards and costs are being formulated following various public consultations and extensive lobbying. Regulation is unquestionably required in data protection, child protection and cyber security, as it is in health and safety.  Measures to preserve national security are also required, but excessive restrictions there can be a dubious pretext for over-reach with anti-competitive protectionism. Regulating competition in other ways is also questionable and should only be contemplated where there is clear evidence of market failure or harm to consumers. Reformers should also tread carefully to ensure that remedies don’t do more harm than good through unintended consequences.

Three proposed interventions to guide the invisible hand

In unregulated or lightly regulated markets, competition and growth can develop most dynamically among different players, technologies and business models. Nevertheless, significant interventions are being pursued in ICT where there have been many successes with enormous and widespread market growth and benefit to consumers. A firm’s market dominance, abnormally high growth and profits might or might not result from anticompetitive abuse. Making a determination on that — one way or the other — requires extensive investigations and ties up lots of limited public agency resources. We should be wary of those accused of such abuse when they seek to distract regulators from that contention by claiming it is those in other markets who are causing market failure or harm to competition.

Two major EU interventions have been conceived to reign-in the dominance of Big Tech companies over others with whom they compete or depend.  A third intervention—with the pretext of protecting Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) from abusive patent licensing—will perversely have the opposite effect.  It bolsters Big Tech and major industrial firms such as car manufacturers against the major value generators in the ICT ecosystem that create the standardized technologies that everyone benefits from using. 

Gatekeepers and other Core Platform Service competitors

America’s Big Tech companies—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft—are deemed to be so big and powerful that they have been identified as “gatekeepers” by  the European Commission under its Digital Markets Act, as has China’s ByteDance. Gatekeeper designations reflect positions in search, browsers, operating systems and video sharing among other Core Platform Services.  The success of these companies is illustrated by those American companies’ combined market value increasing by a half to $9 trillion this year. Prospective regulation could limit the extent to which they own and how they offer and operate complementary services, such as in bundling. Similarly, in the US, Alphabet is being sued by the Department of Justice for abusing its dominant position in search to distort the market, for example, by making Google the default on most smartphones and browsers.

It remains to be seen whether regulating gatekeepers will foster more competition, innovation or economic value overall versus other Core Platform Service providers. Figuring out what kinds of structures and behaviors are anti-competitive is difficult in markets where prices are zero for consumers who pay in-kind by being targeted for advertising and who like the simplicity of bundled and integrated offerings.  What’s not to like about also getting free deliveries when one subscribes to Amazon Prime Video? A recent article in the Economist heralds Garmin in fitness trackers, Dropbox in cloud storage and Mercado-Libre in Latin American e-commerce  as examples of companies that have succeeded in growing revenues in competition with the Big Tech firms. Market failure and harm is difficult to prove because counterfactuals—in the but for world— cannot be observed.  Attempts to block acquisitions by Big Tech companies, manipulate their offerings or even break them up will surely be met with extensive and vigorous legal challenges.

Network cost sharing

Telco industry groups GSMA and European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO) have demanded that companies such as those above they depict as Large Traffic Generators (LTGs), and that are sometimes called Large Traffic Originators (LTOs), should pay their “fair share” of the costs to provide broadband Internet access. The sender-pays principle is based on a long-standing grievance of large telecom operators that Big Tech companies generate the majority of traffic and reap most of the benefits of the Internet economy while not chipping in with the costs.  The European Parliament concurred in a June 2023 resolution:

“that the economic sustainability of telecom networks is essential to achieving the 2030 Digital Compass connectivity targets and high-performance connectivity for all citizens within the EU without jeopardizing competition rules; urges the commission to address and mitigate persistent asymmetries in bargaining power as set out by the European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade; calls for the establishment of a policy framework where large traffic generators contribute fairly to the adequate funding of telecom networks without prejudice to net neutrality.”

Most network traffic is video and this proportion continues to increase. Alphabet’s YouTube, Amazon’s Prime Video and ByteDance’s TikTok among others are evidently major originators of network traffic. 

There is a clear need to keep increasing network capacity to accommodate data traffic growth. According Ericsson’s Mobility Reports, mobile network traffic has doubled every couple of years over the last decade or so. Fixed network traffic has also surged in multiples over recent years. A WIK-Consult study for the Commission found that €174-200 billion is needed to achieve Europe’s 2030 Connectivity Targets, including 5G coverage of all populated areas and gigabit-speed fiber.  As reported by Compass Lexecon, ETNO estimates previous investments of €36-40 billion per year, of which roughly half are traffic related and could have been saved absent the largest content providers’ traffic. According to HSBC, the average return on invested capital for major listed European telcos fell from around 8% in 2012 to around 5% in 2020, with many not achieving their cost of capital. 

There is disagreement about those investment figures. Opposing interests argue that the correct figures show there is no investment gap, and so subsidization by tech would result in excess profits for big telcos. However, the validity of the sub-par return on invested capital figure above does not appear to have been challenged. Big Tech companies have much higher rates of return.

A Compass Lexecon research paper concludes there is market failure. Its economic analysis shows that, where data usage is unlimited for a fixed price per month, there will be under-investment in access networks. Network operators do not have the incentive to maximize investment where incremental traffic generates no additional revenue. While LTOs invest in infrastructure such as content delivery networks, they have no incentive to increase their own costs by investing in access networks to the benefit their direct competitors. Perversely, Europe’s Open Internet Regulation (i.e. net neutrality requirements) only exacerbates this shortcoming because it prohibits allowing a traffic generator to make payments to prioritize or improve its services versus competitors’.  

Incremental capacity investments need to generate incremental revenues to provide a return on such investments. There is a very clear and direct causal relationship between the amount of traffic generated and the network capacity required to carry it. For example, 1 Gbps connections that can reliably carry 1 Tbytes per month will be required as video streaming almost entirely displaces multichannel terrestrial, satellite and cable distribution, eventually. The Big Tech firms can afford to contribute because they derive incremental revenues as the traffic they originate (e.g. as requested by customers) or generate themselves (e.g. advertising) increases.  If charges on them are even-handed versus their direct competitors they will all benefit, as will end users and the network operators. There is precedent elsewhere for cost sharing. In Korea, SKBroadband and SKTelecom have ended their dispute with Netflix and instead forged a partnership in which Netflix service is purchased in a subscription that presumably enables some of the network operator’s costs to be covered. 

Transparency and predictability in SEP licensing

While the Commission’s own studies have found no market failure in Standard-Essential Patent (SEP) licensing, proposed legislation requires licensors to register their patents and have some of them checked for essentiality. Proposals also include the setting of aggregate royalties, and mandatory but non-binding conciliation in the determination of Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) royalty rates.

Purported objectives for “improving the SEP licensing system” include providing transparency and predictability—for example, to SMEs with little or no expertise in licensing. However, licensors claim the associated costs and delays will weaken their positions and devalue their SEPs. 

Some MNOs lobbied to lower royalties as handset costs increased with the introduction of 3G and then 4G in the 2000s. Mobile phones were significantly morphing from mere voice and text devices to smartphones back then. Today’s Big Tech companies showed little interest in mobile SEP licensing until the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and of Android in 2008.  Many Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) subsequently entered the smartphone market without ownership of SEPs.

Comments favoring the Commission’s proposals to regulate royalty rates and licensing are significantly by Apple, automotive manufacturers  and trade groups representing implementers and in some cases funded by the above. The current Spanish Presidency of the Council of the EU is also a fan. The proposed new ministry of patent counting that will also be responsible for setting royalty rates will be at the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) in Alicante. Major SEP owners and licensors are largely against the proposals. Among the 78 responses to the Commission’s request for feedback on its proposed SEP legislation, the only response from a network operator was from Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, which is also an SEP owner. It also notes that “Regulation imposes excessive tasks and costs on SEP holders, even though it is unclear whether SEP holders will receive a fair and adequate return for their efforts.”  It seems Europe’s network operators are prioritizing their more pressing concerns about network costs, as indicated above, over getting involved too deeply in the public debate on SEP licensing.

Europe has enormous existing assets and potential in development and exploitation of new ICT including 5G Advanced, 6G, IoT and AI. For example, Ericsson and Nokia are global leaders in innovation and standards development for communications and video compression technologies. This needs to be nurtured not undermined. They have each invested around one billion dollars in R&D annually over many years. SEP licensing growth to support further innovation in standards should be fostered not attenuated by regulation. Licensing growth with bilateral and multilateral programs to increase licensing in verticals will encourage development of valuable standard-essential technologies that focus on those verticals. For example, SEP licensing in cars by Avanci has encouraged development of C-V2X technologies in 4G and 5G.  Licensing charges at a maximum of $20 for 4G and $32 for 5G per car are small in comparison to the existential threat posed to incumbent OEMs by them being marginalized in provision of value-added ICT services by Big Tech platforms or by being entirely displaced by new-entrant OEMs in Electric Vehicles (EVs), with alternative distribution and customer relationship models, such as Tesla and BYD. 

Harms, litigation and cures

It is abundantly clear that Big Tech platforms are commanding the lion’s share of any economic surplus in consumer ICT markets. Network operators, standard-essential technology developers and many implementers are much less profitable or rated far more modestly for expected growth. 

While I doubt examples of growth by Garmin, Dropbox and Mercardo-Libre will be sufficient to placate the European authorities, market failure and harm to other Core Platform Services providers will be difficult to prove. Vigorous legal challenges to any proposed interventions are inevitable.

Elsewhere, intervention is warranted in dysfunctional markets where some companies are flourishing while others upon whom they depend are unable to make the investment and returns required to provide what consumers want and need. Society will benefit socially and economically  from ubiquitous fixed and mobile gigabit per second and gigabyte per month broadband. 

However, the EU’s proposed regulation in SEPs will diminish SEP licensing costs to the detriment of the licensors who invest in developing the standard-essential technologies that are openly employed by numerous others. No good will come from biting off the hands that feed the entire ecosystem with new and useful standard-based technologies. There is no sign of harm from the SEP licensing business model. On the contrary, this has substantially enabled the very success that America’s Big Tech companies and the predominantly Asian smartphone OEMs have enjoyed from cellular and video standards with an increasingly mobile-first approach in the provision of many ICT services. In most cases these companies contribute little to the cellular and video technology standards development processes. In technology standards development it is a relatively small number of companies that own and license the vast majority of patents declared standard essential, in comparison to the many more firms that implement them.

This article was originally published by RCR Wireless on 27th September 2023.

Japan's METI Releases Guidelines on Negotiating SEP Licenses

On March 31, 2022, the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) released guidelines concerning the negotiation of SEP licenses.  The METI description states:

In recent years, disputes have arisen worldwide on licensing Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) due to the widespread use of standards and the complication of technologies required for such standards. In particular, as the Fourth Industrial Revolution progresses in which many products will be computerized and processing data will create new added-value, SEP licensing among different industries, especially those in which Japan has strengths (e.g., automobiles, construction machinery and factories), is expected to expand in the future. Therefore, it is crucial for Japan to consider measures to resolve such disputes efficiently.

In light of this situation, the Competition Enhancement Office and the Intellectual Property Policy Office of Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) held the “Study Group on Licensing Environment of Standard Essential Patents” (hereinafter referred to as “the Study Group”). The Study Group, comprised of representatives from industry and experts on intellectual property and competition law, has discussed the measures preferable for Japan. Considering problems faced by SEP holders and implementers caused by low predictability and transparency due to the absence of clear rules on the SEP licensing negotiations as well as international trends, METI indicated that “the Japanese government will promptly consider and externally disseminate the rules on good faith negotiations that should be complied with by both SEP holders and implementers” in the interim report of the Study Group published in July 2021, so that good faith negotiations between the parties may encourage early settlements and avoidance of unnecessary disputes, leading to the development of Japanese industries.

Following this policy, METI asked domestic and foreign companies, etc., about their opinions on actions at each of the main steps of SEP licensing negotiations, and METI also asked opinions on the same contents on the website. The Study Group discussed good faith negotiations with reference to these opinions. METI then established the “Good Faith Negotiation Guidelines for Standard Essential Patent Licenses” (hereinafter referred to as “the Guidelines”), considering the results of the discussions. METI also published a report that indicates the process of discussions to establish the Guidelines in the Study Group. 

The Guidelines are the norms of good faith negotiations provided by the Japanese government to be followed by SEP holders and implementers involved in SEP licensing negotiations, including Japanese patents, to realize an appropriate licensing environment through improvement of transparency and predictability of the negotiations. The Guidelines are not legally binding and do not guarantee that, even if followed, negotiations can be judged to be in good faith in each individual case as there are no clear global rules for SEP licensing negotiations. However, METI expects that various parties related to SEP licensing negotiations, such as those in the negotiations and the judiciary, utilize the Guidelines, because METI established the Guidelines considering opinions of domestic and foreign companies, etc., industries and experts on intellectual property and competition law in Japan. METI will also utilize the Guidelines to realize an appropriate licensing environment of SEPs.

The Guidelines are available, here.  The Report is available, here (in Japanese).  A document summarizing the differences between the Guidelines and the JPO document on negotiating concerning SEPs is available, here. 

USPTO and WIPO on ADR for SEP Disputes

The USPTO has announced a partnership with WIPO concerning utilizing alternative dispute resolution for SEP disputes.  The Press Release states:

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) today agreed to undertake joint efforts to facilitate the resolution of disputes related to standard essential patents.

Standard essential patents, or SEPs, are patents that have been declared essential to a given technical standard. As part of the standards-setting process, patent owners may agree to license SEPs on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms. Standards touch all aspects of modern life and include video compression, wireless communication technologies, computer connection standards, automotive technology, and more.

“International standards, and the role of patents that are essential to them, play an important role in promoting a strong national and global economy,” said Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and USPTO Director Kathi Vidal. “The USPTO is grateful that Director General Tang recognized the USPTO’s leadership role in advancing discussions on standard essential patent policies. Our work with WIPO underscores the USPTO’s view that SEP policy is an international issue of international importance. This agreement will leverage existing resources at both the USPTO and WIPO, supporting options to enhance the efficiency of licensing of standard essential patents, and promote resolution of disputes related to those standards.”

The signing of the memorandum of understanding occurred during a meeting this week between Director Vidal and WIPO Director General Daren Tang on the sidelines of WIPO’s General Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland.

Under the terms of the agreement, the USPTO and WIPO will:

• Cooperate on activities that will lend efficiency and effectiveness to the resolution of disputed standard essential patent matters by leveraging existing WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center and USPTO resources, and
• Engage in stakeholder outreach to raise awareness of the services provided by the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center through joint USPTO-WIPO programs.

The agreement will continue in operation for five years from the date of signing.

“We appreciate all the work Director General Tang and WIPO have done in this critical area. We look forward to a successful collaboration and engaging stakeholders to ensure we shape dispute resolution that will facilitate participation and implementation of standards by all innovators including small to medium-sized enterprises,” remarked Director Vidal.

“Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) has time and again demonstrated its value in the efficient and timely resolution of commercial disputes. In the last few years, the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center has been facilitating the resolution of SEP-related disputes and the new collaboration with the USPTO is an exciting development which will contribute to improving the efficiency of standard implementation,” noted Director General Tang.     

Retraction of 2019 Statement on Remedies and SEPs

The USPTO, DOJ and NIST have issued a statement retracting the 2019 policy statement on remedies for SEPs.  The Press Release states:

WASHINGTON—The Department of Justice, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) (the Agencies) announced today the withdrawal of the 2019 Policy Statement on Remedies for Standards-Essential Patents Subject to Voluntary F/RAND Commitments (2019 Statement). After considering public input on the 2019 Statement and possible revisions, the Agencies have concluded that withdrawal of the 2019 Statement is the best course of action for promoting both competition and innovation in the standards ecosystem.

On Jan. 8, 2013, the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice and the USPTO issued a Policy Statement on Remedies for Standards-Essential Patents Subject to Voluntary F/RAND Commitments (2013 Statement). On Dec. 19, 2019 the Agencies withdrew the 2013 Statement and issued the 2019 Statement, which offered the views of the Agencies and expressly recognized that it had “no force or effect of law.” 

In July 2021, President Biden issued an Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy noting that, “[a] fair, open, and competitive marketplace has long been a cornerstone of the American economy.” He encouraged the Agencies to review the 2019 Statement to ensure that it adequately promoted competition.

In response to the Executive Order, on Dec. 6, 2021, the Agencies issued a Draft Policy Statement on Licensing Negotiations and Remedies for Standards-Essential Patents Subject to Voluntary F/RAND Commitments and a request for public comments through a Dec. 6, 2021 news release, extending the deadline for comments in a Dec. 13, 2021 news release. The Agencies thank the wide range of individuals, organizations and other stakeholders who submitted comments, all of which have been considered.

After a review of those comments and a collaborative deliberation on how best to proceed, the Agencies are announcing the withdrawal of the 2019 Statement. As noted in the Withdrawal of the 2019 Statement on Remedies for Standards-Essential Patents Subject to Voluntary F/RAND Commitments, “[a]fter considering potential revisions to that statement, the Agencies have concluded that withdrawal best serves the interests of innovation and competition.” 

“The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is focused on creating incentives to generate more innovation, especially in underserved communities and in key technology areas, and maximizing that innovation’s widespread impact,” said Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and USPTO Director Kathi Vidal. “Forging our global leadership in new industries cannot happen without greater investment in research and development in technologies that may become international standards. We also need greater U.S. engagement in global standards-setting organizations from our large multinational companies, as well as from small- to medium-sized businesses and start-ups. I stand behind any measure that will enable innovation that will drive sustainable, long-term growth in the U.S. economy.”

“The withdrawal of the 2019 Statement will strengthen the ability of U.S. companies to engage and influence international standards that are essential to our nation’s technology leadership and that will enable the global technology markets of today and tomorrow,” said Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and NIST Director Laurie E. Locascio. “A common thread in so many of the thoughtful stakeholder comments we received is a commitment to America’s industry-led, voluntary, consensus-based approach to standards development. This approach consistently delivers the best technical solutions, and I wholeheartedly support it.”

“The Antitrust Division will carefully scrutinize opportunistic conduct by any market player that threatens to stifle competition in violation of the law, with a particular focus on abusive practices that disproportionately affect small and medium sized businesses or highly concentrated markets,” said Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter. “I am hopeful our case-by-case approach will encourage good-faith efforts to reach F/RAND licenses and create consistency for antitrust enforcement policy so that competition may flourish in this important sector of the U.S. economy.”

In exercising its law enforcement role, the Justice Department will review conduct by standards essential patent (SEP) holders or standards implementers on a case-by-case basis to determine if either party is engaging in practices that result in the anticompetitive use of market power or other abusive processes that harm competition. In addition, in accord with President Biden’s Executive Order, the Agencies plan to continue to cooperate as appropriate on matters that affect the intersection of competition, standards development, and intellectual property rights. 

Standards-developing organizations (SDOs) and the widespread and efficient licensing of SEPs on reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) or fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms (collectively F/RAND) help to promote technological innovation, further consumer choice, and enable industry competitiveness, including in emerging technologies and by new and small- to medium-sized market entrants. 

SDOs may require parties participating in the standards development process to voluntarily commit to making patents essential to the standard available on F/RAND terms. The specific F/RAND commitments are contractual obligations that vary by SDO. United States laws and regulations govern the interpretation of those contractual obligations and otherwise govern the conduct of parties participating in SDOs.

Practicalities and Problems in Comparing and Setting FRAND Royalties for SEPs

I was a speaker last week at the Patents in Telecoms & the Internet of Things conference in London. This is an excellent biennial event, organized this year by Professor Sir Robin Jacob of UCL Laws and James Marshall of Taylor Wessing. It focuses on the topic of licensing Standard-essential Patents (SEPs) on Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory terms. I was on a panel among economists Jorge Padilla, Avantika Chowdbury, Tim Pohlman and Mark Schankerman in one of two sessions on FRAND Determination Methodologies: Principles, procedures and problems. The other session focused on comparable licenses. Our session also considered top-down and value-based methods as well as the economics in bargaining agreements.

I have received some requests from conference attendees asking for my panel session talking points. I am posting these here for access by all. My spoken remarks were slightly different, so as not to duplicate what had been said earlier at the event and to save some time. I have added several hyperlinks —mostly to articles of mine—to provide support to some of my assertions.

Value of SEPs in a large ecosystem downstream

Patented intellectual property in products and services such as cellular is clearly very valuable. In an ecosystem that is only 40 years old for voice services, 30 years old for text messaging and just 25 years old for Internet services, more than 6 billion of the world’s 8 billion population have a mobile phone. There are now more cellular connections than there are people on the planet. For most of these people their mobile phone is their primary or only means of calling or accessing the Internet for communications, information, entertainment and commerce.

According to a new report prepared by Kearney for the GSM Association of mobile operators, the Internet value chain was worth $ 6.7 trillion in 2020, with 28% of that value through connectivity services and devices and the vast majority of that in cellular.

Notwithstanding all that, a big question for us here today is what proportion of that value is attributable to cellular SEPs, as distinct from other SEPs and other forms of intellectual property. What are fair shares of value vertically down the supply chain from SEP owners to implementers in device manufacturing and further downstream. And, in the case of SEPs, what are fair and non-discriminatory charges horizontally among different patent owners and licensees?

Patent policies and business models

SEP licensing occurs with different patent policies among different standards setting organizations, and with differing business models among patent owners and voluntary licensing groups.

Some technology standards such as Bluetooth, USB and DOCSIS for cable modems are largely licensed royalty-free by mutual consent among most patent owners. With no patent fees, the only opportunity to monetize intellectual property  is downstream, for example, by implementation along with others’ IP in products.  

In the case of video standards such as AVC/H.264 the vast majority of SEPs are monetized through patent pooling. This voluntary private solution with licensing costing no more than around 20 cents per device divides royalties among patent owners, most of whom are also implementers.

Monetizing SEPs in cellular

In the special case of cellular, SEP owners justifiably seek rather higher royalties, in partial compensation for multi-billion dollar annual R&D investments for innovation and standards development, for example, by the likes of Ericsson, Nokia and Qualcomm at around $5 billion apiece annually. These fees are charged at the handset level at an average aggregate of approximately $10, which is 4% of the $250 average wholesale selling price for mobile phones.

In my previous presentation at this conference series— in Tokyo at the end of 2019— I showed that the economic value added of cellular connectivity, after incremental product costs, in a 4G smartphone was more than 20 times higher than that aggregate royalty rate percentage of 4%. I showed the example of an iPhone model that was priced by Apple at an additional $250 over that for a $200 iPod Touch with near identical functionality apart from the cellular capability costing $32 in manufacture. I also emphasized the significance of this beyond price setting by Apple in what economists call consumers’ “revealed preferences” with 12 times the volume and 46 times the value in sales of iPhones over all iPods.

While there is no cellular SEP licensing further downstream, SEP technologies also generate value in the extended ecosystem of Internet services and beyond including externalities (e.g. human health and safety).

Cellular SEP licensing in mobile phones is almost entirely bilateral among parties with various business models in developing standard-essential technologies and implementing them in devices.  Companies like Qualcomm and InterDigital are more dependent on out-licensing to generate revenue than are vertically-integrated SEP owners like Samsung that is more interested in protecting its downstream handset business with cross-licensing, and in minimizing licensing out-payments for its leading market share of handset sales.

Licensing frameworks

Licensing cellular SEPs is a complex matter given all the above and with FRAND commitments.

So now to the heart of the matter: including practicalities and problems with techniques employed in comparing and setting royalties.

There are various ways of: 1. Defining royalty prices and 2. Determining levels for these.

1.Price definitions

Pricing royalties can be ad valorem – i.e. a percentage of the device cost, or in dollars-per-unit charges, or with a hybrid of the two including dollar floors and caps. Lump sum prepayments are also common. Making comparisons among all these can be tricky and can be presented to give various impressions.

We tend to refer to percentage rates when, for example, talking about aggregate royalties.

Effective royalty rates paid (what I call royalty yields) including aggregate figures have fallen as royalty caps have been exceeded with increasing handset average selling prices as smartphone sales have surged since the mid-2000s.

2.Determining charges

Three commonly used methods include top-down, comparable licenses and value-based methods.

Top-down valuation

Use of top-down methods is inevitable, but I do not like them because of the way the aggregate is set and because of the way this is apportioned. Top-down is increasingly popular with the courts because it is simple and easy to apply. Serious shortcomings include:

• If the royalty base is a chip (e.g. in the  Innovatio case with royalties based on manufacturing profits there) it underrepresents where infringement occurs and where value is generated and is ordinarily paid for.
• As an antidote to alleged “royalty-stacking”, top-down is overkill.
• Even where royalty charges are based on handset prices, an aggregate rate cap is misleading.  The figure is commonly defined as the “worst case” maximum aggregate royalty rate that a licensee without anything to cross-license would be charged. But nobody would ever have to pay that much after various adjustments also demanded e.g. in nations with few patents, or in China were rates tend to be lower that the US and Europe.
• Resulting average payments are a small proportion of aggregate caps.
• I have seen no evidence that these caps were ever derived from any estimate of the economic value of the all the SEPs in the standard and how that should be apportioned vertically, versus downstream stakeholders including implementers.
• Caps are typically figures in announcements by a few self-selected industry players, who had self-serving motivations to limit royalties they would pay out as licensees — particularly with competition among different standards. Selected caps bear no relationship to aggregates actually paid.
• The use of top-down encourages what is called over-declaration. Goodhard’s Law effects result— "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
• Top-down regards all portfolios as having proportionately the same value. But not all patents are standard-essential, essentiality rates vary among SEP owners with some over-declaring, many patents would be found invalid if challenged, and patent values can vary enormously.
• Essentiality checking is very costly, inconsistent, biased and inaccurate.
• Bias is amplified by the courts’ habit of using more exacting and more accurate measures of essentiality checking in the numerator than in a less accurate and bloated denominator in their top-down calculations.
• The US Department of Justice’s 2019 Policy Statement on Remedies for SEPs subject to FRAND Commitments recognized these kinds of problems and instructed courts to avoid rote reference to any particular damages formula when instructing the jury.

Comparable licenses

These are seemingly ideal if they are well established with years of substantial licensed sales volumes and royalty payments. But we can have a chicken and egg problem with new standards such as 5G and some agreements have too little trading associated with them, or are associated with side deals and other actions that make them of dubious applicability.  In my experience with litigation, parties usually differ on which licenses are suitable comps. Some licensees object to use of agreements that were signed under the threat of alleged "patent hold-up". Comparing percentage rates with capped, dollar-per-unit or lump sum figures in different agreements is tricky.

Cross-licenses need to be unpacked to derive one-way rates, which is also problematic including because unpacking calculations tend to use SEP counts that are subject to similar shortcomings as where patent counts are used in top-down methods.

Implementers with small numbers of SEPs can have disproportionately strong leverage against major vertically integrated players with both large SEP portfolios and large downstream businesses to protect from patent infringement claims. Unpacking these cross-licenses underrates the major party.

Value-based methods

These methods are in accordance with patent law and are commonly used where few patents are involved. They seek to measure and apportion economic value. Techniques can include use of hedonic pricing models and consumer preference measurements with conjoint analysis.  I’ve used such techniques as a testifying expert witness in a non-SEP case and in cartel price-fixing litigation.

But judges seem less inclined to consider such methods in FRAND cases where they have misplaced concerns about alleged and unproven patent hold-up and royalty stacking, because they now have the crutch of top-down valuation methods to use in addition to comparable licenses. For example, in the TCL v. Ericsson Decision (which as unanimously and entirely vacated on appeal), Judge Selna threw out an Ericsson expert’s so called “Ex-Standard” valuation approach for lacking fundamental credibility and because the judge thought it suggestive of royalty stacking, even though the judge agreed that TCL did not challenge the methodology, but rather the inputs to the calculations.

I believe that value-based methods should be increasingly employed — not disregarded.  Imperfect though they all are, various different techniques should be explored to figure out where and how much real economic value is generated, and to set royalties accordingly.

US Department of Justice Seeks Public Comments on Draft SEPs and FRAND Policy Statement

The US Department of Justice, Antitrust Division is seeking public comments regarding a new draft policy statement regarding SEPs and FRAND.  Details are below:

The Department of Justice announced today that it is requesting public comment on a new draft policy statement concerning standards-essential patents (SEPs) that seeks to promote good-faith licensing negotiations and addresses the scope of remedies available to patent owners that have agreed to license their essential technologies on reasonable and non-discriminatory or fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (F/RAND) terms. The Justice Department worked with U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in responding to President Biden’s recent Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy, which encouraged the agencies to review the 2019 Policy Statement on Remedies for Standards-Essential Patents Subject to Voluntary F/RAND Commitments to ensure that it adequately promoted competition. Together the agencies, after consulting with the Federal Trade Commission, are now issuing a revised draft statement for public comment.

“The department looks forward to working with our agency partners,” said Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. “We are committed to taking a principled, transparent, and balanced approach at the intersection of intellectual property and antitrust law.”

The draft statement is open to public comment for 30 days and provides a framework to facilitate good-faith licensing negotiation between SEP owners and potential licensees. It also discusses what remedies may be available when SEPs subject to voluntary F/RAND commitments are infringed. The draft statement indicates that good-faith negotiation that leads to widespread and efficient licensing between SEP holders and those who seek to implement standardized technologies can help to promote technology innovation, further consumer choice, and enable industry competitiveness. The draft statement will not be finalized until the agencies consider all stakeholder input.

In particular, the agencies are interested in comments addressing the following questions:

1. Should the 2019 Policy Statement on Remedies for Standards-Essential Patents Subject to Voluntary F/RAND Commitments be revised?
2. Does the draft revised statement appropriately balance the interests of patent holders and implementers in the voluntary consensus standards process, consistent with the prevailing legal framework for assessing infringement remedies?
3. Does the draft revised statement address the competition concerns about the potential for extension of market power beyond appropriate patent scope identified in the July 9, 2021 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy?
4. In your experience, has the possibility of injunctive relief been a significant factor in negotiations over SEPs subject to a voluntary F/RAND commitment? If so, how often have you experienced this?
5. Are other challenges typically present in negotiating a SEP license? If so, what information should be provided or exchanged as a practical matter to make negotiation more efficient and transparent?
6. Are small business owners and small inventors impacted by perceived licensing inefficiencies involving SEPs? If so, how can licensing be made more efficient and transparent for small businesses and small inventors that either own, or seek to license, SEPs?
7. Will the licensing considerations set forth in the draft revised Statement promote a useful framework for good-faith F/RAND licensing negotiations? In what ways could the framework be improved? How can any framework for good-faith negotiations, and this framework in particular, better support the intellectual property rights policies of standards-setting organizations?
8. What other impacts, if any, would the draft revised statement have on standards-setting organizations and contributors to the standards development process?
9. The draft revised statement discusses fact patterns intended to indicate when a potential licensee is willing or unwilling to take a F/RAND license. Are there other examples of willingness or unwillingness that should be included in the statement?
10. Have prior executive branch policy statements on SEPs been used by courts, other authorities, or in licensing negotiations? If so, what effect has the use of those statements had on the licensing process, outcomes, or resolutions?
11. Are there resources or information that the U.S. government could provide/develop to help inform businesses about licensing SEPs subject to a voluntary F/RAND commitment?

Interested parties, including attorneys, economists, academics, consumer groups, industry stakeholders or other members of the public may submit public comments to Regulations.gov until Jan. 5, 2022. Information about the draft revised statement can also be found on the Antitrust Division’s website.