NIPC Law

Author  Dori   Public Domain Source  Wikimedia Commons Jane Lambert Patents Court  (Mr Justice Mellor)  Mitsubishi Electric Corporation and another v Archos SA and others   [[2021] EWHC 1639 (Pat) (16 June 2021) The first claimant is the proprietor of European patents  2,254,259 ("259") and  1,903 689 ("689") . They are part of a portfolio called the "MCP Pool!" which the claimants have promised to license on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory ("FRAND") terms.  The defendants are manufacturers of 4G mobile phones.  The claimants argued that the defendants required their licence in order to comply with the LTE (4G) standard concerned with the transmission of a scheduling request (SR) to request uplink resources. The defendants denied that those patents were essential for compliance with the patent and pleaded that the patents were invalid for lack of novelty and an inventive step.  They also alleged that 689 was bad for ad...

The Rolls Building Author Basher Eyre   Licence CC BY-SA 2.0   Source  Wikimedia Commons   Jane Lambert Patents Court (Mr Justice Mellor) Mitsubishi Electric Company and another v Archos SA and others   [2021] EWHC 889 (Pat) (13 April 2021) A FRAND case is essentially a patent infringement claim where the remedy to which a successful claimant would normally be entitled has been modified by agreement.  Mr Justice Birss summarized the principle succinctly at para [83] of his judgment in   Unwired Planet International Ltd v Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd and anothe r [2017] EWHC 711 (Pat) (5 April 2017): "The point of FRAND in standard setting is fairly easy to understand. Standards exist so that different manufacturers can produce equipment which is interoperable with the result that the manufacturers compete with one another. So the phone makers compete in the market for phones and the public can select a phone from any supplier and be sure (for exa...

Jane Lambert   Patents Court (Sir Alistair Norris)  Mitsubishi Electric Corporation and another v Archos SA and other s [2020] EWHC 2641 (Pat) (9 Oct 2020) In these proceedings, Sir Alistair Norris was asked to vary a confidentiality order that had been made by Mr Justice Mann at a case management conference on 22 July 2020.  The order was made in an action to set the terms of a licence to work certain patents that were alleged to be essential for compliance with a mobile telecommunications standard. That was one of a number of issues between the Mitsubishi Electric Corporation and    Sisvel International SA on the one hand and several implementers of the standard on the other.   The other issues were the jurisdiction of the English courts, whether the patents had been infringed and whether the terms of the licence that the claimants were prepared to offer were fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory ("FRAND"). The reason why Mr Justice Mann made ...