A Research Agenda for Standards-Essential Patents

This Chapter discusses the current state of legal, economic and policy research on standards-essential patents (SEPs) and fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) licensing of SEPs, and recommends additional research directions for the future. Areas for future research include the investigation of market adoption of standardized products subject to FRAND licensing and available on a royalty-free basis, measurement of various characteristics of SEPs including disclosure, validity, essentiality and transfer, the evolution of SDO and consortia patent policies, SEP licensing behavior, both by SEP holders and product manufacturers, SEP and FRAND disputes and litigation, including arbitration, competition among patent pools for standards, and the political economy of SEP policy making