An Antitrust and IP Breakfast Seminar - The Legal and Economic Issues of Standard Setting: SSOs, SEPs and F/RAND

Description

Jeffery Cross and Edward Rice, Partners in the Litigation Practice Group, along with Anne Layne-Farrar and Sean Durkin from Charles River Associates will explore the legal and economic issues of standard setting. 

About the Event: 

Standard setting is ubiquitous in today’s society, allowing the products produced by different manufacturers to work together.  Standard setting can run the gamut from the screw threads for copper tubing to boiler cut-off valves to smartphones and Wi-Fi systems for the Internet.  One report noted that, in the United States today, there are over 600 standard setting organizations that have produced over 50,000 standards. Standard setting by private organizations produce a number of important benefits to society flowing from the interoperability of products that implement the standards, including to lower consumer costs.  Such standard setting, however, raises a host of legal and economic issues, including issues involving antitrust and intellectual property.  Standard setting that involves patented technology raises a series of unique legal and economic issues, including the requirements of standard setting organizations (SSOs) that members participating in the process disclose patents that may be essential to the standard (SEPs) and commit to license such patents on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminating terms (F/RAND).

A PDF invitation is attached.