1. Kung-Chung Liu and Rui Li have published A Critique on WT/DS611 Panel and Arbitration: To Better Understand Chinese Courts, Anti-Suit Injunction, and TRIPS, 2026 GRUR Int. (Advance Access Publication June 25, 2026). Here is the abstract:
More and more often, parties and national courts are resorting to anti-suit injunctions (ASIs) to deal with the issues caused by parallel proceedings disputing the fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory licensing of standard essential patents. Recent and sporadic ASIs issued by Chinese courts have led to a dispute between the EU and China before the WTO. The Panel report and arbitration award touch upon the term ‘give effect’ Art. 1(1), first sentence of TRIPS, and the territoriality principle embedded in intellectual property treaties, and therefore can be consequential for the dispute settlement mechanism of the WTO and the understanding of TRIPS. The arbitration also reveals alarming misperceptions about how Chinese courts, especially the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) and its IP Tribunal, operate. This Opinion will address these three issues. It will first summarize the findings and reasonings of the Panel and the arbitration to set the stage, explain how the SPC, not its IP Tribunal, normally regulates through written policies to dispute the existence of a so-called ‘unwritten’ ASI policy, and persuade that even there were such an ASI policy, it is an autonomous judicial policy, well grounded, non-binding on lower courts, defensively applied, well-reasoned, settlement-conducive, and should be welcomed. This Opinion then argues that the ordinary meaning of ‘give effect’ does not allow the expansive reading by the arbitration; and that such a reading would also be an unacceptable deviation from the territoriality principle.
2. Peter Slowinski and Fabian Hoffmann have posted a paper on ssrn titled Third-Party Determination of Interim Licenses and Security Payments: A German Approach to the Huawei Framework. Here is a link to the paper, and here is the abstract:
Litigation of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) takes place in Europe within the framework provided by the CJEU in its landmark decision Huawei v. ZTE. However, Courts in Europe are still struggling to find the best approach for the resolution of these disputes. German courts and the UPC rely on competition law and a determination of whether the parties have been willing to conclude a license. British courts focus on the setting of license terms but their approach is not entirely convincing, either. This article shows an alternative way forward based on instruments from German civil law that use third-party determination of contract terms. It combines these instruments with a preliminary calculation of a security and down-payments to provide parties with an interest-oriented way forward. The proposed third-party determination of FRAND terms is deliberately not a final determination but limited to the interim period before a final agreement. This preserves the autonomy of the parties while supporting them in the settlement process and it does not affect the right to be heard in court. Moreover, the obligation to demonstrate willingness to grant or take a license entails the necessity not to reject the other party's proposal for a third-party determination for the interim period. And in infringement proceedings it increases the pressure to negotiate constructively to reach a FRAND compliant agreement. While the method is based on German civil law, it is transferable to other legal systems and can be equally applied in the Unified Patent Court.
3. Enrico Bonadio and Arjun Solanki also have posted a paper on ssrn, titled Reinvigorating Competition Law in SEP Litigation: Towards a More Balanced UK Framework for Standard Essential Patents. Here is a link, and here is the abstract:
The United Kingdom has become a leading forum for adjudicating standard essential patent (SEP) and fair, reasonable and non‑discriminatory (FRAND) disputes, yet competition law has played a strikingly marginal role in this jurisprudence. Despite EU enforcement practice on SEPs and abuse of dominance, no UK court has issued a standalone competition law decision in a SEP case and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has not opened any SEP‑focused investigation. This article offers a systematic account of this “competition silence”, showing how institutional incentives, evidential burdens and post‑Brexit doctrinal uncertainty have channelled disputes into contractual FRAND rate‑setting and left Chapter II of the UK Competition Act effectively dormant. It argues that FRAND adjudication is an incomplete substitute for competition enforcement: retrospective, bilateral and ill‑suited to addressing market‑wide harms such as supra‑FRAND royalties, coercive injunctions against willing licensees and exclusionary licensing practices. Against the backdrop of the withdrawn EU SEP Regulation, the pending Supreme Court appeal in Optis v Apple and the CMA’s expanded powers under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, the article contends that the UK is at an inflection point in SEP governance and advances a calibrated reform agenda to reinvigorate competition law’s role while complementing judicial FRAND.
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