Among numerous
legal, economic and commercial concerns about the European Commission’s proposed legislation for Standard Essential Patent (SEP)
licensing, its plans for aggregate rate setting and mandatory Fair, Reasonable
and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) rate determinations in various technology standards
raises all kinds of issues and alarms.
Following publication of the proposed legislation and impact assessment
on April 27, the Commission has been seeking online feedback submissions by August 10,
2023.
In a previous posting here and in my initial feedback submission the Commission 14th June, I have argued against the Commission’s apparent intention to abandon the established
approach of using comparable licensing agreements directly as benchmarks in
FRAND rate determinations, and instead apportion rates among SEP owners based on their respective shares of total SEPs using
the top-down approach.