Injunctions for Standard-Essential Patents: a new article with a European perspective

Recently published in the Journal of Competition Law & Economics (2013) 9 (2): 285-311 is an article, "Injunctions for Standard-Esential Patents: Justice is not blind". The authors are Peter Camesasca, Gregor Langus, Damien Neven and Pat Treacy .  I'm not familiar with the first three authors but the fourth, Pat Treacy, is a partner at Bristows who has long specialised in areas of interface between IP and competition law and who is also a founder member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice (JIPLP), which I edit.

 According to the abstract:

"Leading competition authorities such as DG Competition (“DG COMP”) and the U.S. agencies have recently expressed concern about the potential for injunctions to be used by owners of patents declared essential to a standard (SEP) to extract excessive royalties from licensees (that is, hold up). This was a central issue in the agencies' review of the acquisition of Motorola Mobility by Google in 2011, following which DG COMP opened investigations against Samsung and Motorola Mobility in early 2012 to assess whether these companies may have abused some of their essential patents.

This article aims to contribute to the debate on the merit of the availability of injunctions for SEPs. We address the perception that the current system contains inadequate protection for licensees against the risk of hold up on the part of SEP owners through the application for injunctions. We provide an overview of court procedures currently in place across key jurisdictions and argue that the risk of hold up is overstated and that serious consideration should be given in the policy debate to the risk of reverse hold up by the licensees before contemplating change. Importantly, our analysis takes into account the possibility of opportunistic behavior by prospective licensees. This feature has been noted before but not explicitly modeled so far."

If this article is of any interest to you and you are not a subscriber to JCLE, you can still purchase short-term online access to it via the journal's website here.

Has it ever happened ...?

Interim injunctive relief for infringement
of a standards-essential patent: have
you ever applied ...?

A curious reader has written in with the following question. Does anyone have an answer?

(a) Has anyone ever applied in the United Kingdom for an interim injunction in respect of a standards-essential patent;

(b) If the answer to (a) is yes, what happened?

This blogger thinks that the answer to (a) is "no" -- but he is equally aware that patent litigation in the UK is a dark and murky pond in which many a large fish may lurk undetected.  In fishing for an answer on behalf of his reader, he hopes that one such fish may bite ...