Sisvel's narrowband IoT patent pool boosts value proposition with Huawei and others bringing in many patents while lower rates enable new applications such as printable trackers

Patent pool administrator Sisvel just announced that Huawei, one of the largest patent holders in this space, has joined the narrowband Internet of Things (IoT) patent pool that was launched last November. The largest founding licensor was Ericsson.

This is the second Sisvel pool for Huawei to join. More than a year ago, Huawei started its working relationship with Sisvel as an initial licensor of its WiFi 6 pool (as Sisvel president Mattia Fogliacco recalls in today's press release) and is also an Avanci 5G licensor, which shows that the Chinese innovator is increasingly receptive to pool-based licensing solutions. Other major SEP holders may now be more interested in joining this pool, given that Huawei and Ericsson (as well as various other patent holders) already give the licensing program a lot of substance.

Sisvel's updated list of NB-IoT licensors contains several other names I haven't previously noticed, such as KPN, Deutsche Telekom, and BlackBerry. What licensees get is a "one-stop shop" (as Sisvel's cellular IoT program manager Sven Torringer calls it in today's press release) that gives them access to more than two dozen patent portfolios, with Huawei, Ericsson, and NTT Docomo being considered particularly strong in narrowband IoT. It's fair to say that Huawei had a leadership role in the development of the IoT-related parts of the 4G/LTE standard.

Sisvel's press release mentions "new royalty rates for the Cellular IoT patent pool, including for devices with a lower selling price," and that it has "expanded its offering to new product verticals." Previously, as I reported at the time, the rate was "$0.66 per unit for LTE-M" and "a distinction [was] made between asset trackers ($1.33 per unit) and smart meters ($2 per unit)." The $2 (smart meters) and $1.33 (smart sensors with a selling price above $20 and up to $130) price points are still found. But now there is also a $0.35 per-unit royalty rate for smart sensors with a selling price above $6 (up to $20) and a $0.08 per-unit rate for devices with a selling price of $6 or less.

For makers of low-priced IoT products, this means the value proposition has changed enormously in their favor: far more patents, and far lower rates for certain applications. It looks like two factors have resulted in this more flexible and attractive royalty structure:

• In my commentary on the creation of the pool I already noted that the challenge for an IoT patent pool is market development: it's not enough to offer licenses or to dissuade implementer from infringement, but about adoption of the standard. Patent pool administrators operate in a two-sided market. They have to bring licensors and licensees together, and in order to do so, they have to listen to both sides.

• Sisvel's new NB-IoT royalty rates are definitely reconcilable with Huawei's bilateral licensing terms for such products, which are highly differentiated as I explained last month. The pool is a one-stop option, but it's not the only way to get access to Huawei's intellectual property.

  Huawei is both a major patent holder and a large-scale implementer. If a pool worked for only one side, Huawei would find it hard or even impossible to join.

The rock-bottom rates that the pool now offers for devices with a selling price of $6 or less should enable new applications. What comes to mind as potentially the highest-volume and lowest-price NB-IoT application is called printable NB-IoT tracking labels. They are asset trackers in the form of stickers that could, for instance, track an Amazon package.

At a time when policy makers are working on an EU SEP Regulation, it's warranted to put major SEP news such as this one into the current political context. The European Commission's Directorate-General for the Internal Market (DG GROW) clearly underestimated the extent to which patent pools could be part of the solution as opposed to being part of the problem. The favorite pretext (not only of DG GROW but also Apple and its allies and astroturfers) to push for legislative intervention is that IoT SMEs allegedly need a different legal environment. But patent holders are smart enough to realize that IoT patent licensing won't work unless the royalty rates enable IoT product makers to thrive. While I still haven't seen a single SEP enforcement action against an SME as defined by the EU, and the IoT sector is generally not a legal battlefield at the moment, the market continues to find and improve solutions.

Patent pools not only bring licensors together with licensees, but also have to broker a compromise between licensors of very different kinds. Huawei with its high product volume (which is not fully visible to people in the Western hemisphere for purely geopolitical reasons, but is a reality in the rest of the world) obviously has a more balanced take than a non-practicing entity, which is not meant to disparage NPEs but plainly a fact. In order for a pool to unite product makers like Huawei and Ericsson with infrastructure companies like NTT Docomo and Deutsche Telekom as well as with research institutes and patent licensing firms, it has to identify royalty rates that work for all of them.

An EUIPO-led process for aggregate (entire standard) and bilateral (licensor A and licensee B) royalty determinations will cause delay and complicate matters. In the meantime, patent pool administrators and other market actors work out and fine-tune the solutions they offer.

With so much in flux especially concerning IoT, the prudent thing for the EU to do would be to wait and better understand what's going on. Instead of trying to adopt something before the end of the legislative term just for the sake of having some kind of outcome to show (no matter how flawed), they should go back to the drawing board and take note of new developments, such as IoT licensing terms becoming more attractive at a breathtaking pace.

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Optis v. Apple FRAND ruling could be delayed by Justice Marcus Smith's new merger case (Microsoft-ActivisionBlizzard); GenghisComm sues Toyota over SEPs; updates on Nokia-OPPO, KPN-Ericsson

This is a roundup post that discusses four different standard-essential patent (SEP) disputes and multiple jurisdictions. Quick links:

1. Optis v. Apple FRAND ruling could be delayed by Justice Marcus Smith's new merger case (Microsoft-ActivisionBlizzard)

2. GenghisComm (not an Avanci licensor) sues Avanci licensee Toyota over SEPs

3. Nokia invalidated OPPO patent-in-suit

4. KPN defended one of patents-in-suit against Ericsson earlier this month

1. Optis v. Apple FRAND ruling could be delayed by Justice Marcus Smith's new merger case (Microsoft-ActivisionBlizzard)

It's been almost a year since the Optis Wireless v. Apple trial in the High Court of Justice in London, but no decision has come down yet. In a similar case, InterDigital v. Lenovo, it took Justice Mellor similarly long as those FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) rate-setting cases are incredibly labor-intensive for the courts adjudicating them.

The judge presiding over the FRAND part of the Optis v. Apple case is Mr Justice Marcus Smith, whose reputation extends not only to patent but also competition law: he is the President of the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CATribunal, or just CAT) of the United Kingdom.

It is not unusual for judges to divide their time between two courts. In fact, numerous European patent judges are doing so now between national courts and the Unified Patent Court (UPC). Since a few days ago, Mr Justice Smith is presiding over an antitrust case that is by far the biggest in the CAT's history, not only in terms of what's at stake (Microsoft's $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard) but also the enormous public and media attention--and on top of all of that, it's a matter that the UK's Prime Minister (who stressed the CMA's responsibility for growth and investment), Chancellor of the Exchequer, and its Parliament's Business and Trade Committee are concerned about.

Microsoft filed its appeal of a Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) merger-blocking decision on Wednesday evening UK time. Mr Justice Smith published the summary of the grounds of appeal (PDF) approximately 48 hours later and scheduled a case management conference for Tuesday (May 30). I already predicted at the beginning of this month that he would personally preside over that ultra-high-profile appeal. After yesterday's publication of the summary of the appeal, I commented on the grounds of appeal in a 40-part Twitter thread and added some further commentary on the comity part.

I'll live-tweet about the case management conference on Tuesday.

The deal has been cleared by the regulators who decided the matter for 38 countries (30 of them European Economic Area member states), with a collective population of 2.4 billion and aggregate GDP of $45 trillion, so if not for the CMA's absurd ruling, the deal could actually close now. But the CMA's leadership would like their agency--which the CAT has to overrule fairly often if one considers the deferential standard of review called Judicial Review--to be the world's policeman for major mergers, especially major tech mergers. There is profound concern in the UK over the CMA's eccentricities and regulatory overreach, and the CAT is now called upon to restore sanity and curb megalomania.

The CMA is now an outlier on the global stage. The only regulator to agree with them is the FTC, which under its current leadership opposes virtually any merger it gets to review and openly admits it doesn't care about losing in court all the time. The CMA decision is so clearly biased and incorrect that more and more people are wondering whether the reason is not just regulatory hubris or a lack of understanding of the technology markets involved, but whether it is even attributable (at least in part) to bad faith. My personal opinion is that a good-faith merger decision where the regulator looks at all of the evidence with an open mind and strives faithfully to apply the law to the facts definitely looks different.

There are mistakes that can be adequately explained with a lack of diligence (the CMA totally embarrassed not only itself but the UK and its government when the provisional findings--the equivalent of the Statement of Objections in the EU--subtracted only one year of costs from five years of benefits. The CMA corrected that mistake after Microsoft pointed it out, and revised the provisional findings. That was almost certainly just a lack of diligence. But the final decision just showed that before the merger review even started in earnest they must have been hellbent on blocking the merger. After they had to give up their primary theory of harm (vertical foreclosure affecting Sony in the videogame console market) and even prior to that realized they had to drop a "conglomerate" theory (involving Windows (an open platform), Azure (an easily substitutable commodity), the Xbox, and Activision Blizzard's games), they simply shoehorned those failed theories of harm into a "cloud gaming" theory of harm.

Weeks before Microsoft filed its appeal, the gamer community had already identified and discussed plenty of issues on Twitter and discussion boards. The decision is not just flawed or extremely wrong. It's a lot worse than that.

Against that background, gamers and other observers of the process can't be blamed for asking questions about the impartiality of the person who according to what a reporter from a major news agency told me "basically made the decision for the CMA": the agency's Senior Director of Mergers, Colin Raftery. Only because I wanted my many Twitter followers with an interest in that merger topic to understand that an unbalanced panel might respond to a historic speech by EU antitrust chief Magrethe Vestager on the same day, I mentioned--and proved based on a LinkedIn screenshot--that Mr. Rafferty started his career and spent seven years at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, a firm that has been consistently adverse to Microsoft for decades and is representing the most vocal critic of the Activision deal--Sony Interactive Entertainment--in its worldwide complaints, also in the UK. Cleary also advises Google, the other (and less vocal) complainant, but not in this context it seems. That factoid was picked up by Windows Central, and other media reported as well. On social media (Twitter, TikTok etc.) there was widespread outrage. My personal opinion is that none of us knows what Mr. Raftery's personal relationship with the Cleary lawyers opposing the deal on Sony's behalf--and with Sony's executives--is, so the truth could be anything from reassuring to mildly disconcerting to problematic.

It turned out that Mr. Raftery was previously instrumental to a merger-blocking decision that favored a former client. And it doesn't look good that the CMA takes an extreme position on a vertical merger now (Microsoft-ActivisionBlizzard) while it allowed Sony to make a horizontal acquisition of particular relevance to the UK market.

It now befalls Mr Justice Smith and his CATribunal to ensure a legally correct outcome and to restore the general public's confidence in the UK regulatory process. The fact that the first case management conference already takes place a few days later suggests that he wants to adjudicate the matter as swiftly as possible, which is in everyone's interest except Cleary and two of its clients, and CMA officials who may hope that the merger will be abandoned before their mistakes and their abuse of power won't be exposed.

People are already talking about a novelization or a documentary about that merger, given that some of what has happened here amounts to truth being stranger than fiction. I guess some of my blog posts and tweets about the case will come in handy if and when that happens. Those of you who have practiced law before Mr Justice Smith, or know him as a colleague, can already think about which Hollywood actor might play him.

2. GenghisComm (not an Avanci licensor) sues Avanci licensee Toyota over SEPs

There isn't much happening anymore in terms of automotive SEP litigation. Avanci has licensed the vast majority of car makers, Continental finally gave up its U.S. federal antitrust litigation against Avanci and some of its licensors (continuing only its Delaware state law action against Nokia), and Telit dropped a lawsuit that had been brought by Thales in Munich against Avanci and Nokia.

While the European Commission doesn't seem to appreciate the contribution of patent pools to the licensing process the way it used to do, Avanci's success has made it part of the solution. Recently even Samsung--one of the world's largest implementers of cellular standards--joined Avanci as a licensor at no extra cost to licensees.

A few SEP holders--some of which are non-practicing entities--still aren't Avanci licensors. One such company is GenghisComm Holdings, which on Wednesday filed a SEP infringement lawsuit in the Eastern District of Texas against Toyota:

When it comes to comparable licenses, Toyota will be able to point to the license it has taken from Avanci, paying $15 per car for the vast majority of 4G SEPs. GenghisComm is presumably suing for the purpose of extracting a substantially higher royalty rate relatieve to the strength of its portfolio. Maybe the plan is to benefit from the unpredictability of patent damages verdicts.

3. Nokia invalidated OPPO patent-in-suit

About two weeks ago I reported on the (appealable) revocation of two Nokia patents as a result of OPPO's challenges. For the sake of complete reporting, I'd like to add that this month a written decision (PDF) also came down in an opposition proceeding in which Nokia has achieved the (equally appealable) revocation of an OPPO patent-in-suit: EP3563600 on "separate configuration of numerology-associated resources." the oral hearing took place on March 23.

4. KPN defended one of its patents-in-suit against Ericsson earlier this month

Here's a follow-up to the post of a few days ago on Ericsson obtaining the invalidation (by the USPTO's PTAB) of one of KPN's patents-in-suit. I hadn't previously commented on that dispute, so now I'd like to provide a bit more context.

Of the three patents-in-suit from KPN's first case against Ericsson in the Eastern District of Texas,

• one (RE'089) was invalidated as I reported,

• one was never challenged through an IPR petition (U.S. Patent No. 8,881,235 on "service-based authentication to a network"), and

• a third one, U.S. Patent No. 9,253,637 on a "telecommunications network and method for time-based network access", was deemed valid by the PTAB in a May 12, 2023 decision (IPR2022-00069).

A second KPN v. Ericsson case is also pending in the same district (i.e., before Judge Rodney Gilstrap):

Koninklijke KPN N.V. v. Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson and Ericsson Inc. (case no. 2:22-cv-282-JRG): July 25, 2022 complaint

According to the docket, the trial will begin on April 1, 2024 with jury selection.

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Ericsson strikes down patent underlying KPN's $32 million jury verdict from August 2022: PTAB invalidates all challenged claims

The patent infringement dispute between Dutch telecommunications carrier KPN and Swedish telecommunications equipment maker Ericsson is unusual because infrastructure makers typically sell products to telcos rather than getting sued by them over patents. What is not that unusual, though, is the fact that Ericsson is on the receiving end of that case. Ericsson and Nokia, while being net licensors, typically have multiple disputes pending at any given time in which someone else wants to collect patent royalties somewhere, most frequently in the United States. That's why those two companies don't take extreme positions when they are on the enforcing side: they know what it's like when the shoe is on the other food, and they know that whatever they say as a defendant may be held against them as a plaintiff (though inconsistencies could only undermine their credibility but in the end all that should matter is the law).

Last August, a jury in the Eastern District of Texas handed down a verdict in KPN's favor and relating to a package of three patents. The verdict form did not distinguish by patent or claim, but merely indicated whether "any" of the claims had been infringed and whether any of the patents were invalid (juries rarely ever invalidated patents, and here they also thought all patents-in-suit were valid):

Koninklijke KPN N.V. v. Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson & Ericsson Inc. (case no. 2:21-cv-113-JRG, E.D. Tex.): Jury Verdict of August 26, 2022

KPN is apparently never going to get the $32 million payout.

One of the three patents-in-suit, U.S. Patent No. RE48,089 on a "method and system for automatic coverage assessment for cooperating wireless access networks", has now been invalidated by the PTAB. Ericsson--represented by the Baker Botts firm--challenged most claims, also including the ones asserted in the Texas infringement action, and prevailed across the board. The PTAB judgment came down yesterday:

Ericsson Inc. v. Koninklijke KPN N.V. (PTAB IPR2022-00079, Patent RE48,089): Judgment (of May 23, 2023) Determining All Challenged Claims Unpatentable

Maybe this decision will pave the way for a settlement between the parties. They should be commercial partners, not adversaries in patent litigation.

Earlier today I commented on USPTO Director Kathi Vidal's proposed PTAB IPR rulemaking reform. Then I saw this interesting PTAB decision.

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Avanci Broadcast patent pool adds ETRI, KPN, NEC, NERC-DTV, thereby increasing coverage of ATSC 3.0 standard-essential patent families to 80%

In March, Avanci announced its first non-automotive standard-essential patent (SEP) pool: Avanci Broadcast, a pool for the ATSC 3.0 (also known as NextGenTV) broadcasting standard that is particularly popular in the United States and in South Korea.

At the time of its launch, the pool contained more than 70% of the ATSC 3.0-essential SEP families, and the vast majority of TV sets supporting ATSC 3.0 were licensed from the beginning (though it's important to consider that TV sets are not only the device category to implement ATSC 3.0; there are also set-top boxes, for instance). Some of the licensor are also major implementers, but not all initial licensees were also licensors (Sony is only a licensee).

The ATSC 3.0 pool was the first Avanci pool to announce Samsung as a licensor. Shortly thereafter, Samsung also joined Avanci's automotive SEP pool.

Today Avanci announced the Avanci Broadcast pool's expansion to "over 80% of essential patent families for the ATSC 3.0 broadcasting standard" through the addition of four licensors:

• South Korean research institute ETRI,

• Dutch telecommunications carrier KPN,

• Japanese electronics giant NEC, and

• China's Shanghai National Engineering Research Center of Digital Television (NERC-DTV).

Existing licensees (LG, Samsung, Sharp, Sony) are now automatically licensed to the new licensors' ATSC 3.0 SEPs as well, at no additional cost. That is a feature of the Avanci pools, but also of many other patent pools. In my opinion, the European Commission's recently somewhat negative take on patent pools does not give sufficient consideration to that (and not only to that) fact.

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Sisvel's third patent pool announcement in a row: 5G multimode pool for consumer electronics products includes patents from 14 licensors such as Mitsubishi, Siemens, major telcos

Sisvel just announced a new patent licensing program, and it's the third major pool to have been launched by this administrator in the second half of 2022:

1. In July, Sisvel announced a WiFi 6 pool with patents from such licensors as Huawei, Philips, and MediaTek.

2. A little over a month ago, a cellular patent pool for narrowband IoT devices (standards: LTE-M and NB-IoT) was launched. The initial licensors are a large and diverse group including Ericsson, some network operators, renowned research institutes, and chipset makers.

3. This morning, Sisvel launched a 5G Multimode ("5G MM") Licensing Program, which "will be focused on consumer electronic products, and includes the 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G SEPs owned by 14 founding companies: Alfred Consulting LLC, Intellectual Discovery Co., Ltd., JVCKENWOOD Corporation, KDDI Corporation, Koninklijke KPN N.V., Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Siemens Aktiengesellschaft, SK Telecom Co., Ltd., Technology in Ariscale, LLC, Telefónica S.A., TIM S.p.A., Wilus Inc., Wireless Innovations, LLC and Sisvel [with respect to the patents that have been assigned to it]."

This means Sisvel's pools cover the latest wireless standards (5G, WiFi 6) and emerging fields of use (narrowband IoT: smart meters, asset trackers).

In April, Via Licensing announced its exit from the wireless patent pool business, leaving Sisvel as the only administrator of a cellular SEP pool for consumer electronics products such as smartphones. Effectively, Sisvel's announcement today is not just an update (from 4G to 5G) but also serves to consolidate the industry, as Sisvel's 5G MM program manager Donald Chan says in today's press release:

"Sisvel’s 5G MM program will be the only cellular patent pool directed to the wireless market for consumer electronic products, with Via Licensing having announced its exit from the space. Having a single patent pool will help eliminate confusion in the market and increase cellular licensing efficiencies for implementers and licensors alike."

And there are indeed several former Via licensors in this new Sisvel pool from the get-go.

The announcement makes it clear that the door is open to additional licensors. It mentions that "Sisvel is also continuing discussions with various additional companies that may have an interest in joining the pool," and "invites all parties that have patents they believe to be essential to the cellular standards to join the patent pool" (subject to an independent essentiality evaluation).

Obviously, some large cellular SEP holders such as Ericsson and Nokia are going to license only bilaterally. They have the licensing and litigation departments in place to go it alone. For instance, Ericsson announced a new license agreement with Apple on Friday, settling litigation that was pending in several countries. But for many other patent holders, contributing their IP to a pool is an attractive option as it reduces transaction costs.

The initial group of Sisvel 5G MM licensors already makes this pool a licensor that by some metrics plays in the same league as some of the largest individual cellular SEP owners. There can be no doubt that Sisvel's 5G MM pool will from the beginning be able to present a very significant number of essentiality claim charts to licensees.

The per-unit royalty rates are stated on Sisvel's website and even the entire license agreement (PDF) is publicly available. These are the per-device license fees:

up to 5G	up to 4G	up to 3G
US$0.50	US$0.42	US$0.25

The total addressable market is roughly a billion devices per year.

The royalty rates are actually lower than past published rates, which should make the offer more palatable to licensees. What always poses a challenge to patent holders and pool administrators is to work things out with implementers who sell most of their devices in very price-sensitive geographies. Sisvel has been quite successful in that regard, striking agreements with the likes of OPPO (the opposite--no pun intended--of a soft target) and vivo.

I can see various key success factors here that suggest it will make more sense for licensees to take the offer than to provoke infringement lawsuits, and more sense for cellular SEP owners who are similarly situated as the initial licensors to join this pool than to engage in experiments:

• the aggregate significance of the cellular SEP portfolios that have already been contributed to the pool,

• the license fee that I believe will easily be deemed FRAND should a court reach that question, and

• the pool administrator's track record of being able to work out many license deals without litigation, but also being prepared to address infringement and hold-out behavior if need be.

IAM has also reported on Sisvel's announcement (paywalled). It is an important development for the 5G patent licensing space. I consider it likely that we'll hear from this pool again on multiple occasions next year, with additional licensors joining that group as well as device makers entering into license agreements (which aren't always announced, but sometimes).

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Dutch network operator KPN becomes 7th Avanci licensor to sue Ford Motor Company over 4G standard-essential patents: Munich court schedules first hearing for September

KPN, the telecommunications carrier formerly owned by the Kingdom of the Netherlands (long-form name: Koninklijke KPN N.V.), has recently filed a patent infringement lawsuit in Munich against Ford Motor Company's German subsidiary (named Ford-Werke GmbH) over EP2291033 on a "telecommunications network and method for time-based network access." The patent-in-suit has been declared essential to the 4G (LTE) standard, and this particular patent family has been asserted against various defendants over the past ten years.

The Munich I Regional Court's case no. is 7 O 4255/22 (Seventh Civil Chamber; Presiding Judge: Dr. Matthias Zigann). The complaint was served on Ford on May 6. The iconic U.S. automaker has until July 6, 2022, to file its answer to the complaint. Counsel has yet to appear on Ford's behalf. The first of the two hearings that are usually held in patent cases in Munich has been scheduled for September 15, 2022. Normally, a first hearing in a Munich case is focused on claim construction and infringement analysis. The court is currently testing a new approach to cases involving multi-patent disputes between the same parties, with a FRAND hearing in the lead case of a given dispute going ahead first. Here, no other patent infringement complaints by KPN against Ford are known at this stage.

Yet there is a context to this case. Ford is still unlicensed to most if not all of the SEPs in the Avanci pool, unlike several other U.S. car makers:

• Tesla is widely known (though it has not been officially confirmed) to have taken an Avanci license (as multiple parallel cases by Avanci licensors against Tesla were dismissed within a few days of each other).

• Rivian has been confirmed by Avanci to be licensed; and

• just this month, General Motors--Ford's larger neighbor (6 million cars per year vs. 4 million)--was announced as Avanci's latest licensee, with the patent pool firm saying that it has now licensed a total of 37 automotive brands and more than 55 million connected vehicles.

The same week that the Avanci-GM announcement was made, Chief Judge Rodney Gilstrap of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas explained in Ericsson v. Apple that an implementer who rejects a FRAND offer, but implements the relevant SEPs anyway, "subject[s] itself to actions for infringement." That's what's happening here. Ford is being sued over SEPs left, right, and center. Here's a non-exhaustive list of blog posts on SEP assertions by six other Avanci licensors (yes, KPN is already the seventh, making me wonder when and where this will end given that Avanci has four dozen contributors) and one non-Avanci licensor:

• Optis/Unwired Planet group sues Ford Motor Company over five 4G standard-essential patents in Eastern District of Texas: sixth Avanci licensor to go after Ford

• Sol IP adds 16 more standard-essential patents to infringement lawsuit against Ford Motor Company in Eastern District of Texas: now 21 patents-in-suit (potentially new record)

• Neo Wireless [not an Avanci licensor] expanding patent enforcement campaign to automotive: actions filed against Ford, Honda, VW, Nissan, GM, Tesla, Toyota with five U.S. district courts

• Another patent lawsuit against Ford discovered [MiiCS v. Ford] -- and a great automotive IP conference taking place in Frankfurt next week

• Sisvel becomes third Avanci licensor to sue Ford Motor Company over cellular standard-essential patents (and a post on Sisvel's Munich cases

• Japan's IP Bridge appears close to license agreement with OPPO, but Ford still holding out: 4G standard-essential patent disputes in Munich (the trial will continue the day after tomorrow--Thursday, May 19, 2022)

• L2 Mobile Technologies [a Longhorn IP subsidiary] claims Qualcomm chips in Ford, Lincoln cars infringe 3G standard-essential patents originally obtained by ASUSTeK

In alphabetical order, these are the seven Avanci licensors currently enforcing 4G SEPs against Ford:

• IP Bridge

• KPN

• L2 Mobile Technologies

• MiiCS

• Optis (alongside PanOptis and Unwired Planet)

• Sisvel

• Sol IP

Lucky Seven? It's going to be hard for Ford to persuade the courts--be it in the Eastern District of Texas, the District of Delaware, or in Munich--that it's not an unwilling licensee.

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