Standards organizations developing cellular communication standards typically require participants to disclose standard essential patents (SEPs) and agree to license such patents on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.
This academic paper, “Aggregate Royalty for Cellular SEPs in Recent Court Decisions,” published in GRUR Patent by CRA Competition experts Nadia Soboleva and John Hayes examines aggregate royalty rates for cellular Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) across five major recent court decisions involving disputes about FRAND (Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory) licensing terms.
A cellular standard has thousands of SEPs held in many separate portfolios. Aggregate royalty per mobile device assigns value to all SEPs across many portfolios for a given standard. The authors found that the aggregate royalty per mobile device in most of these decisions falls in a range from $3 to $16, with an average of $9.25.
The analysis provides important benchmarking data for ongoing SEP licensing negotiations and highlights the continuing evolution of judicial approaches to FRAND royalty determination in the cellular technology space.
