Essential patent

Essential patent

An essential patent is a patent which discloses and claims one or more inventions that are required to practice a given industry standard. [ [http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/thicket.pdf Shapiro, Carl, “Navigating the Patent Thicket: Cross Licenses, Patent Pools, and Standard-Setting”, forthcoming Innovation Policy and the Economy, Volume I, MIT Press, 2001] ] Standardisation bodies, therefore, often require members disclose and grant licenses to patents and pending patent applications that they own and that cover a standard that the body is developing. Failure to do so is a form of patent misuse.

If standards bodies fail to get licenses to all patents that are essential to practicing a standard, then the owners of those unlicensed patents can often demand royalties from those who ultimately adopt the standards. This is what happened, for example, to the GIF and JPEG standards.

References

See also

* Patent ambush, a situation where a member of a standards organization withholds information about patents they own during development of a proposed standard and subsequently claims them to be relevant to the standard as adopted.
* Patent pool
* Patent thicket

External links

* " [http://www.abanet.org/antitrust/at-committees/at-exemc/pdf/liability.pdf Potential Antitrust Liability Based on a Patent Owner's Manipulation of Industry Standard Setting] ", "Proceedings of ABA Antitrust Section Spring Meeting" (2003) by Janice M. Mueller.
* " [http://www.law.berkeley.edu/journals/btlj/articles/vol17/mueller.pdf Patent Misuse Through the Capture of Industry Standards] ", 17 "Berkeley Tech. L.J." 623 (2002) by Janice M. Mueller.


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