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20 November 2015Patents

BMW and Cisco help to launch FRAND alliance

BMW, Cisco Systems and several other companies have established the Fair Standards Alliance in order to promote the licensing of standard-essential patents (SEPs) on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.

Among the core beliefs of the group is that a FRAND licensing agreement should be transparent, that legal threats and injunction requests should be asserted only after other options have been exhausted, and that ‘patent tying’—where a licensor requests a royalty based on its complete patent portfolio rather than just relevant patents—should be ended.

Also, the group said a FRAND deal should be upheld even if the ownership of a SEP is transferred to another party.

The group, based in Brussels, was launched on November 12 and its other members include Dell and HP.

Mark Chandler, senior vice president and general counsel at Cisco, said: “As a company that develops products in Europe and sells globally the products we develop in Europe, Cisco is an active participant in global and European public policy discussions aimed at ensuring that FRAND really means fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory.”

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8 February 2016   Companies that own standard-essential patents must stick to their obligation of licensing them on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, the EU commissioner for competition has said.