1. Giuseppe Colangelo and Valerio Torti have posted on ssrn the following abstract of their paper Filling Huawei's Gaps: The Recent German Case Law on Standard essential Patents, Eur. Comp. L. Rev. (forthcoming):
The Huawei ruling identified the steps that owners and users of SEPs will have to follow in negotiating a FRAND royalty. Compliance with the code of conduct will shield patent holders from the gaze of competition law and, at the same time, will protect implementers from the threat of an injunction.
The licensing framework provided by the CJEU is aimed at increasing legal certainty and predictability for the whole standardisation environment. Nevertheless, the judgment has been criticised because a relevant number of issues are left unresolved. In this scenario the activities of national courts in filling the gaps left by the CJEU deserve the utmost consideration. This paper will seek to explore the approach developed at national level post Huawei, focusing on the German judicial experience.
2. Urska Petrovcic has posted on ssrn the following abstract of her paper Injunctions for Standard-Essential Patents in the European Union:
Injunctions for standard essential patents (SEPs) — that is, patents that are essential to practice an industry standard — have been at the center of the antitrust debate for more than a decade. In July 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued its long awaited decision in Huawei Technologies. Co. v. ZTE Corp., in which it addressed, for the first time, the question of whether an SEP holder’s request for an injunction could violate Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) — the provision of EU competition law that prohibits a dominant company from abusing its market position. In this article, I analyze the implications of the CJEU’s judgment for SEP holders that seek to enforce their SEPs in the European Union. Huawei confirmed that an SEP holder faces a stricter level of antitrust scrutiny in the European Union than in some other jurisdictions, such as the United States. In practical terms, however, the developments that followed Huawei showed that the judgment limited Article 102 TFEU’s scope in addressing an SEP holder’s behavior, when compared with the approach that the European Commission had adopted in its previous investigations. After Huawei, an SEP holder’s request for an injunction is less likely to trigger antitrust liability under Article 102 TFEU. In addition, Huawei raised the barrier that an SEP holder must overcome to obtain an injunction. Yet, the requirements established in Huawei are not so strict as to preclude obtaining that remedy. Unlike in the United States, where, as of August 2017, no SEP holder has obtained an injunction, several SEP holders have requested and obtained injunctions against infringers in the European Union.
3. Nicolo Zingales has posted on ssrn a paper titled The Legal Framework for SEP Disputes in EU Post-Huawei: Whither Harmonization?. Here is a link to the paper, and here is the abstract:
This article revisits the antitrust treatment of unilateral conduct in Standard Essential Patent (SEP) disputes in EU, with particular focus on the landmark CJEU judgment in Huawei v ZTE and the way it has affected subsequent developments before national courts. It illustrates that while the Court in Huawei significantly improved legal certainty both for SEP holders and their potential licensees, it also left open a number of crucial questions affecting everyday’s licensing practice. First, it is not entirely clear whether the liability of an SEP holder presupposes leveraging by a vertically integrated firm or can also arise in purely vertical or horizontal relationships. Secondly, the safe harbor procedure formulated in the judgment begs important questions concerning burden of proof and portfolio licensing, which have given rise to divergent interpretations. It follows that the space remains wide open for competing national and even regional approaches to the rights and obligations of SEP holders, calling for further European harmonization - be it judicially, legislatively, or administratively through the European Commission. In support for the latter measures, the article illustrates the limited remit of EU private international law rules in preventing the forum shopping which is likely to unfold as a result of a fragmented landscape for the resolution of SEP disputes.
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