Reports

World’s 1st Wi-Fi Economic Report finds RAND royalty rate to be between $0.04 and $0.69

Unified Patents and The Brattle Group, a renowned group of economists and damages experts, announced its economic report on the reasonable and non-discriminatory (“RAND”) licensing value of patents essential to the Wi-Fi standard (“Standard Essential Patents” or “SEPs”). The full report is available exclusively to members of Unified Patents’ Wi-Fi Zone, which includes access to Unified’s ML-based objective patent landscaping analytics (“OPAL”) and indexed IEEE standardization technical submissions repository (“OPEN”).

Brattle calculated the range of reasonable and non-discriminatory (“RAND”) royalty rates for the universe of SEPs essential to implement the full capabilities of Wi-Fi, including up to Wi-Fi 6/6E, to be between $0.04 and $0.69. For the first time an economist calculated rates based on device capability requirements using downlink speed, latency, and a new power-saving capability implemented in Wi-Fi 6 called target wake time (“TWT”). Brattle concluded that Wi-Fi devices that utilize lesser capabilities should pay lower royalties, if any, because almost all SEPs necessary for those have expired.

Brattle calculated royalty rates on Wi-Fi using two independent observations. First, using court-established global RAND rates for Wi-Fi 4 (such as the 2013 Innovatio case) as a benchmark, taking into account incremental technological improvements in Wi-Fi 6/6E, declining production costs, current and evolving use case demands, and balanced bargaining theory, they concluded rates should be steadily declining. Second, a negotiated Wi-Fi 6/6E license between a licensor and a major hardware manufacturer. Both methods accounted for objective patent quality using court accepted measures such as adjusted patent forward citations. Unified’s OPAL analytics, which includes the world’s largest training set of manually evaluated Wi-Fi patents, was used to identify the individual SEPs in the landscape. In addition, Brattle calculated the stand-alone value of TWT.

For its report, Brattle interviewed industry participants and did independent research. It found Wi-Fi 4’s capabilities are sufficient for data-intensive use cases like video, gaming, and most virtual reality (“VR”). Brattle noted producer prices and consumer prices have been flat or falling for over a decade while computing and communications performance has improved by a factor of over 50 times.

The report is designed to be used for a top-down analysis of Wi-Fi RAND rates. Together with Unified’s OPAL analytics, the report can be used to calculate the RAND rate of any patent portfolio for Wi-Fi devices based on their capability requirements as well as for individual Wi-Fi capabilities. The report and OPAL provide Wi-Fi implementers a better understanding of the value of an asserted portfolio and enables them to make RAND counter offers in good faith. OPAL also enables the identification of individual patents in an asserted portfolio and provides a suite of quality metrics such as ML-based semantic similarity scoring and geographic and reputational value, forward citation, claim breadth, and statistical validity indexes.

The full report is available exclusively through Unified Patents. In addition to economic reports, Unified provides Objective Patent Landscapes (OPAL) for many standards, including Wi-Fi 6, with the world’s largest human evaluated training set, 3GPP LTE and 5G, HEVC, AVC, and others. Unified’s standard submission database, OPEN, allows users to access all contributions to major standards such as 3GPP, MPEG, IEEE, and IETF.

Download Unified Consulting’s Wi-Fi Economic Report slides presented at this year’s Corporate IP Strategy Conference in November.

Nearly $500 million in Economic Benefit From Fewer NHK-Fintiv Denials at the PTAB: Report

The Perryman Group, in a recent economic study commissioned by Unified Edge, has found that over the next 10 years, the total economic benefit of reducing discretionary denials of inter partes review proceedings under criteria such as the NHK-Fintiv rules will lead to an increase in US business activity of $482.1 million, $230.4 million in personal income, and approximately 2,000 job-years of employment.

Source: The Perryman Group

Conversely, any activity that would reinforce or ensconce those rules or other forms of discretionary denial edicts—i.e., a continuation of current practice—could cost the U.S. economy almost $500 million. 

The report, The Potential Economic Benefits of Recent Reductions in Discretionary Denial of Inter Partes Review Based on Criteria such as the NHK-Fintiv Rules (March 2023), was commissioned by Unified Edge in part to explore the as-yet unstudied economic impact the NHK-Fintiv criteria. It researches, organizes, and provides data-backed studies and evidence to further regulatory and policy goals, and works to keep the policymakers up to date and informed on ongoing policies, data, and the regulatory landscape to move the law forward in a just, reasoned, and evidence-based way.

Read the entire report HERE.

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Track LIEs (Litigation … ) in Unified’s Portal

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As part of ongoing deterrence activities, Unified’s Portal is introducing the most comprehensive tracker of Litigation Investment Entities (LIEs). Tracking and reporting will be conducted on at least a quarterly basis and will attempt to shed light on this growing but nonetheless little-understood part of the patent litigation landscape. 

The LIEs tracker will consist of two components - a field for NPE Aggregator or NPE parent company of multiple NPEs, and the second is an option if a case is backed by a secured interest or by third-party financing. 

Users can use the plaintiff specific filters to search for entities such as IP Edge or Acacia. Using the Third Party Financing filter, a list of cases will be generated where a secured interest or known third party has an investment into a patent that has been litigated.

In addition to being able to search for NPE Aggregators and Third Party Financing Commitments, the case deal page will provide flags to understand if an entity is part of NPE Aggregator and Financed, such as Ridgeview IP LLC.

Also in the tracker, users can understand the true impact of LIEs and NPE Aggregators by using the Annual Report Tool for a graphical point of view. 

Click HERE for more information on the methodology and to read through Unified’s first LIEs Report. To view the LIEs Tracker in Portal, please click here.

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Toronto Globe reports on Unified's in-depth portfolio analysis of Blackberry and its delayed sale to NPE

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At the beginning of 2022, BlackBerry announced that Catapult IP Innovations Inc. had agreed to buy several patents in a deal worth over $400-million dollars, but by June, the deal was off. Unified’s Director of Analytics, Sam Baird, analyzed the potential value of the divested portfolio of 37,175 patents, which would be one of the largest patent deals in the past decade. Mr. Baird has noted the buyer’s cost could exceed $900 million USD, including related maintenance costs, prosecution fees and litigation costs.

5G value to cars found to be less than $10

The June 2022 Brattle Group report calculates Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) royalty rates for wireless Standard-Essential Patents (SEPs) in vehicles for both 4G/LTE and 5G. 

Brattle found that wireless technology is increasingly expanding from handsets to the Internet of Things (IoT), including “connected vehicles.” LTE royalties for handsets (unlike those for vehicles) have been market and court tested, offering clarity around applicable FRAND rates for handsets. Rates for vehicles thus were calculated using LTE handset rates as a benchmark; adjusted for the differences in usage and capabilities. Brattle also found royalty rates for 5G as applied to vehicles to be the same as LTE because 5G rates have not been market or court tested and 5G currently offers no additional value to vehicles over LTE. While some 5G connected vehicle applications may create value in the future, that future is still uncertain and years away. Brattle notes that widespread adoption of 5G connected vehicle applications is necessary before any appreciable value can be attached to them.  

Brattle uses two distinct approaches to obtain an independent, FRAND rate. The first identified a vehicle’s Telematics Control Unit (TCU) as the key licensable component and calculated a FRAND rate of $6.57 per vehicle for a comparable TCU-capable handset, adjusted for the lower connectivity and usage requirements of vehicles.

The second approach uses the consumers’ relative willingness to pay for wireless connectivity in different applications as an indicator of the relative value of a 4G license in those applications, and found that consumers value connectivity in vehicles significantly less than in handsets. Using this approach, Brattle found the rate to be $7.76 per vehicle.

The full report and other 5G tools are available exclusively through Unified Patents.  In addition to economic reports, Unified provides Objective Patent Landscapes (OPAL) for many standards, including 5G and LTE, with the world’s largest human evaluated training set, Wi-Fi 6, HEVC, AVC, and others.  Unified’s standard submission database, OPEN, allows users to access all contributions to major standards such as 3GPP, MPEG, IEEE, and IETF.

Complete the form below to receive the full executive summary done by the Brattle Group and sponsored by Unified Patents.