Kidon IP War Stories David Cohen & Richard Vary
David L. Cohen
Kidon IP Corp. / David L Cohen, P.C. - IP Market Making and related legal services
My next talk is with Richard Vary. I first met Richard when I joined Nokia’s in-house IP litigation team in 2007. Richard had recently joined from a prestigious law firm in London. Richard worked his way up to ultimately become a VP and head of litigation at Nokia – where he oversaw some of their most successful and important litigation and licensing campaigns.
He is now a partner at Bird & Bird in London focusing on various international arbitration and litigation matters. Our discussion focuses on how little has changed, argument-wise, but how much has changed from a practical perspective in licensing disputes on patents that read on technical standards. We dive in deep pretty quickly but most listeners should be able to follow our discussion.
For those wishing more background I highly suggest some of Richard’s many pieces on essential patents and FRAND (many of which are collected at?https://muckrack.com/richard-vary/art… ) and of course, the many pieces I have written as well.
A very interesting discussion between David L. Cohen and Richard Vary. Two veterans of the smartphone wars. Richard is was good to hear you explain that a lot of the IPCom patents were invalidated on prosecution issues in particular Art. 123(2) and it was not that the Bosch engineers did not make good inventions. Bosch had a pretty good patent preparation and filing organization. Their weakness was that they seemed to have a page count limit which made a lot of their SEPs too thin. With the high volume of SEPs being filed (many in a slapdash and haphazard way in my view) I think validity will remain a big issue - and a much bigger issue than "essentiality." Which indicates that the Commission's interest in "essentiality checks" will be an expensive and burdensome process of measuring the wrong thing. Also very interesting Richard's comments on the cost of UK litigation and that this will make a lot of IoT disputes too expensive to litigate versus the amount of royalty to be collected. This also makes the Commission's concerns about SMEs in IoT seem overwrought. It is my view that most IoT SMEs will be able to fly harmlessly through the radar because the cost of shooting SEP missiles at them will not justify the returns.
Founder & CEO of KYield. Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence, Data Physics and Knowledge Engineering.
2 年Interesting and educational discussion, David. Good content for decision makers in large tech companies as well as growing tech companies. A lot of change in IP law in last 15 years.