Intellectual Property
Intellectual property (IP) has become a major issue in the mobile communications industry, particularly with the advent of global standards, such as GSM. Such systems emerge based on thousands of man-hours of research and development effort from many different organisations and, as a result, they are built on the IP from an array of different sources.
We have a wealth of experience in assisting organisations to understand the impact and value of specific items of IP. We have performed large scale analyses of patent pools and their essentiality to particular global standards and we have also evaluated the strength of companies’ patent portfolios to assess the level of protection they have for their proprietary products.
In the vast majority of cases, organisations involved in the manufacture and supply of mobile communications equipment are able to negotiate cross-licensing agreements. These allow them to make use of IP owned by other organisations in their products and also receive licence fees for the use of their IP in other organisations’ products. However, on occasion, negotiations break down and it falls to the courts to decide on the validity of a patent and whether it is essential to a particular standard or infringed by a particular piece of equipment.
We have provided expert witnesses in patent disputes, preparing detailed reports and testifying in the High Court in London in cases including Interdigital v Nokia and IP Com v Nokia.
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