EU told: Ditch amendments to ‘beyond repair’ SEP reforms
European Parliament committee prepares to vote on controversial proposals | Critics vent over ‘own goal’ and ‘failed’ attempts to improve ‘fundamentally flawed’ plans to regulate standard-essential patents.
A European Parliament committee is facing calls to reject amendments to the EU Commission’s controversial proposals to regulate standard-essential patents (SEPs), ahead of tomorrow’s pivotal vote on the draft reforms.
European technology organisation IP Europe, whose members include Dolby, Nokia, and Qualcomm, is backing the outright rejection of all ‘compromise’ amendments to the regulation, arguing that they will be unable to fix a proposal that is “beyond repair”.
Described on its website as a coalition of R&D-intensive organisations, IP Europe’s members include licensors and implementers of patents, including SEPs.
With its much-scrutinised framework, first published in April 2023, the Commission aims to set ‘fair’ royalties for SEPs through licensing on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.
However, the proposals have fuelled intense debate, particularly within the technology and telecoms industries.
An ‘own goal’
IP Europe’s latest attack stems from the publication of the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) October 2023 report on the draft regulations, which offered compromise amendments. JURI is set to vote on the amendments tomorrow.
In the October report, JURI analysts mostly swung their support behind the Commission’s proposals but requested more clarity in areas including commitments to FRAND determinations, as well as parallel proceedings, arbitration, essentiality checks and royalties.
In December, IP Europe lambasted the draft JURI committee report as “an own goal in the making”.
IP Europe renewed this criticism in a statement released yesterday, January 22, arguing that the JURI report, if adopted, would compromise European leadership in 5G and 6G and other critical technologies.
Further, it is likely to favour the redistribution of revenues in favour of foreign device manufacturers and threaten European competitiveness and ability to invest in technology, according to the organisation.
‘Beyond repair’
“Like the underlying Commission proposal, the draft report is fundamentally flawed. IP Europe has made this point in its engagement with MEPs,” said the group.
“Some of the individual amendments tabled to the draft report sought to temper the worst problems: these positive contributions have not been taken onboard in the compromise amendments.”
Additionally, the organisation insisted that the compromise amendments failed to rectify the problems with the draft report or address the underlying issues with the Commission’s proposal.
“In all fairness, the Commission’s proposal was a suboptimal starting point for the European Parliament’s work on this file.
“In light of this, the only viable way forward now is to reject the compromise amendments and instead for the European Parliament to commence work to prepare its own report, guiding the Commission as to its priorities in this area,” it added.
Essentially, IP Europe held that rather than “pushing ahead with unnecessary haste” with amendments that do not fix “a proposal that has been called out as “beyond repair”, the European Parliament should instead:
