Monday, December 4, 2017

Assistant AG Delrahim's Speech on FRAND, Patents, and SSOs

A speech delivered on November 10 by the new head of the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, Makan Delrahim, has gotten a fair amount of publicity from a number of sources, with for example the IAM Blog reporting that former USPTO Director David Kappos referred to the speech as "the most important DOJ antitrust speech on IP during my decades practising law, ” and similar praise coming from Judge Douglas Ginsburg and Koren Wong-Ervin in a paper titled The Department of Justice's Long-Awaited and Much Needed Course-Correction on FRAND-Assured Standard-Essential Patents.  Though I could be wrong, my own somewhat contrarian view is that the speech isn't nearly as significant as some of these observers seem to think.

First, while it's true that Mr. Delrahim's speech is very pro-patent-owner in its orientation--arguing, for example, that "holdout" on the part of prospective licensees is "a more serious impediment to innovation" than is "holdup" on the part of  patent owners, and suggesting that injunctive relief should be more widely available in SEP/FRAND cases--it's important to recognize that these views, while deserving of consideration and respect, are not binding on any court.  The Antitrust Division has no more of a say over the conduct of patent infringement litigation than does any other unrelated entity or person.

Second, while the speech clearly indicates that the DOJ won't view alleged violations of FRAND commitments as antitrust violations, or seek to penalize patent owners for seeking injunctions, this is hardly a change in course for the DOJ.  I don't believe there were any cases during the previous administration in which the DOJ challenged these practices as antitrust violations.  As I discussed in this paper in 2014, among the reasons why U.S. antitrust law wouldn't be conducive to such claims are that U.S. antitrust law generally doesn't condemn monopoly exploitation as opposed to expansion or maintenance, and (as Mr. Delrahim points out) doesn't regulate prices; there's also might be a Noerr-Pennington problem in basing liability based on a non-sham request for injunctive relief.  True, in 2013 the DOJ and USPTO jointly published a document titled Policy Statement on Remedies for Standards-Essential Patents Subject to Voluntary FRAND Commitments, which addressed "whether injunctive relief in judicial proceedings or exclusion orders in investigations under section 337 of the Tariff Act of 19301 are properly issued when a patent holder seeking such a remedy asserts standards-essential patents that are encumbered by a RAND or FRAND licensing commitment."  This document was cited by USTR Froman later that year in his veto of an exclusion order entered by the ITC.  And in two cases (Robert Bosch and Google/Motorola) the FTC (by a 3-2 vote) conditioned its acquiescence in a corporate acquisition on the acquiring party's commitment to not to seek injunctive relief for the infringement of FRAND-committed patents by willing licensees.  Still and all, there are lots of reasons why U.S. antitrust law hasn't gone any further than this, and probably wouldn't have done so under a President Hilary Clinton administration.  

Antitrust law in other countries, of course, may take a different approach, though one reason for this (as I have argued) is that in most other countries injunctions remain the default remedy for patent infringement, thus leaving antitrust (or the "abuse of right" doctrine, or something else) to pick up the slack.  But I don't view Mr. Delrahim's speech as presenting a big change in U.S. antitrust law on this issue (and even if it did, of course, his comments would bind at most the DOJ, not the FTC or the courts or the course of private antitrust litigation).

Mr. Delrahim's commentary could be significant in two other respects, however.  First, his comments may suggest that at the margin the DOJ will take a more hands-off approach to other types of cases at the intersection of IP and antitrust law.  Second, and more explicitly, Mr. Delrahim's comments suggest that the DOJ may take a harder look at the conduct of standard-setting organizations (SSOs) as potential violations of the Sherman Act.  The obvious implication here is the DOJ will be less likely going forward to take a favorable view of policies like those adopted by the IEEE in 2015, under which the SSO requires members not to seek injunctive relief against willing licensees and to calculate FRAND royalties using the SSPPU as the royalty based.  (See the  February 2, 2015 Business Review Letter from Renata Hesse, Acting Assistant U.S. Attorney General, to Michael Lindsay, available here.)  That shift in policy is potentially of some consequence, though to my knowledge no other SSO has followed the IEEE's lead in this regard (perhaps due to the controversy, whether deserved or not, that that policy engendered).

All told, then, while I could surely be proven wrong, I don't think the speech merits quite the reaction it has received among some of the commentators. 

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