First Patent Pool for 3GPP Infrastructure Launched to Help Accelerate 5G

Alium, a joint patent pool venture between MPEG LA and Unified Patents, is supporting the development of Open RAN by providing a solution to the uncertainty and risk posed by the more than 100,000 essential patents already self-declared. 

Open RAN increases competition in the telecommunications infrastructure space, enabling mobile networks to use different vendors interchangeably, thereby lowering costs. Support for Open RAN has increased significantly over the last several years. Governments around the world (including the US, India, Japan, and Australia) have declared the growth of Open RAN solutions to be strategic to their economic and national security.

But for the Open RAN market to grow to more than 220 million units by 2030 as projected, the market must address the risk and the patent uncertainty that threatens to slow adoption.

Alium was created to do that by providing a license of convenience for Radio Unit vendors to help decrease uncertainty in patent licensing fees related to their products while also providing compensation to patent holders for developing the technology.

Alium’s program is innovative:

• Offers licenses for 4G / 5G infrastructure

• Uses AI-based landscapes to determine royalty allocation (Methodology is here)

• Requires no money from patent holders to participate

• Includes a Patent Quality program to build the integrity of the Open RAN ecosystem by discouraging the assertion of invalid patents

The Alium Open RAN Radio Unit License provides a one-stop solution for vendors to receive a license with leading patent owners in a single transaction at a low per unit cost. Alium is currently signing up leading patent owners to offer the License to the market starting in Q1 2022. The full agreement is available to qualified licensors and licensees immediately.

For more information, please go to https://www.alium-llc.com/ or email: info@alium-llc.com.

Comprehensive Empirical Study on Multiple SSO IPR Policy Revisions Shows No Effect On Participation

In a new study by Boston University’s Timothy Simcoe and Qing Zhang from Charles River Associates (using support from Unified’s OPEN platform and Edge / Patent Quality Initiative), the pair researched the impact of changes to Standard Setting Organization (SSO) intellectual property rights (IPR) policies on participation, standardization, and innovation for two well-known IPR policy revisions: a 2003 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) switch from Fair Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) to Royalty-Free licensing and a 2015 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) IPR policy revision. The study found these changes resulted in little or no measurable decline in participation or innovation in patent-intensive parts of either SSO. The results held for both the W3C and IEEE across numerous measures and “treatment” vs “control” group comparisons. These quantitative findings appear to contradict the theory that revisions to licensing policy alter participation in any meaningful way.

To download the entire article, visit SSRN HERE.

Another Velos Media patent held unpatentable

On September 29, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. Velos Media, LLC holding all challenged claims of U.S. Patent No. 10,110,898 unpatentable. The ’898 patent, generally directed to video quantization techniques for limiting the data that results from the encoding process, represents one of the largest patent families known to be owned by Velos Media, LLC.

Velos claims to have and seeks to license patents allegedly essential to the HEVC / H.265 standard. The family of the '898 patent, originally assigned to Sony Corporation, was transferred to Velos Media in 2018.  

Visit Unified’s Public Portal for more information about its Video Codec landscape (OPAL) and standard submission repository (OPEN). To read the petition and review the case record, view IPR2019-00763 on the Portal. Unified was represented by Andrew Sommer from Greenberg Traurig and in-house counsel, Roshan Mansinghani and Ashraf Fawzy, in this proceeding.

Unified Consulting 5G study finds significant submarine patents

Unified Consulting (UC), a sister company to Unified Patents, recently completed a study on 5G and identified using the 5G OPAL (Objective PAtent Landscape) tool which evaluated over 1,000,000 patents for essentiality based on participation and almost 100,000 self-declared patents. It is based on the OPEN 3GPP (Standard Submission Repository) with over 200,000 3GPP / 5G contributions and a methodology using an AI based semantic similarity algorithm.

The study found a significant number of UNDECLARED patents are likely essential for 5G. They include well known companies such as Comcast, China Mobile, Coolpad, Acer, and many others. UC calls these submarine patents since FRAND may not apply to them based on some current court decisions. A table of some of these can be found in the chart below. The full article can be found here:

5G Submarine Patents