An article I only recently came across is Joseph Lau's FRAND Defences Against the Grant of Injunctive Relief: Applying Huawei v. ZTE in Singapore and China, 16 Asian J. Comp. L. 33 (2021). Here is a link to the article, and here is the abstract:
From the size of A4 paper to 5G in the telecommunications sector, standards are ubiquitous. Standard essential patents (SEPs), which protect technology essential to standards, enable their proprietors to gain significant market power. Antitrust authorities therefore scrutinize the exercise of SEPs for breaches of competition law. In this regard, the ability of SEP proprietors to obtain injunctions against implementers as a remedy for infringement of SEPs where licensing negotiations have broken down or are ‘ongoing’ has proven controversial. Some fear that this enables SEP proprietors to threaten injunctions unless implementers agree to unfair, unreasonable, or discriminatory terms. In Huawei Technologies Co Ltd v ZTE Corp [2015] ECLI:EU:C:2015:477, the Court of Justice of the European Union identified circumstances where a SEP proprietor’s application for injunctive relief as a remedy for infringement of its SEP constitutes an abuse of a dominant position, with the classification of the SEP proprietor’s application as being abusive forming a ‘FRAND Defence’ which implementers may invoke against the grant of the injunction requested. This article analyzes whether this approach can be replicated by the Singapore Courts and whether the Chinese Courts, which have already dealt with SEP licensing disputes, adopt a similar approach.
I thought the article's discussion of how courts in Singapore might address FRAND cases was quite interesting. The author argues that the most likely doctrinal tool would not be competition law, but rather the equitable nature of injunctive relief, Singapore being a common-law jurisdiction. The article also includes a good discussion of Chinese case law and Chinese court guidelines as of 2020.
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