Published: 1/29/16
Publication: Comparative Patent Remedies
On July 16, 2015, the Court of Justice for the European Union (CJEU) issued its judgment in Huawei v. ZTE, setting out certain conditions under which E.U. competition law precludes the owner of a FRAND-committed standard-essential patent (SEP) from seeking injunctive relief for the unauthorized use of the patent. (Recently, by the way, the CJEU issued a correction to the German version of the judgment, clarifying the conditions the owner of a FRAND-committed SEP must fulfill if it is to obtain an injunction–namely, that the owner must both inform the alleged infringer of the alleged infringement and make a concrete offer on FRAND conditions; for discussion, see this post from the Kluwer Patent Blog. Previously the German text was ambiguous on whether both conditions needed to be fulfilled because of the placement in paragraph 71 of the words “vor Erhebung des Klages,” meaning “before asserting the claim”; it now conforms to the French and English versions.)