FRAND Licensing and Standards-Essential Patents: Concocting for Impending Technologies

Abstract

Engineering of innumerable advancement in telecommunications placed India at a plinth of one of the largest telecommunication markets. In essence, most of these ingenuities pivot around a strong information, communication technology (“ITC”) platform; therefore, at the juncture of business and innovation Intellectual Property Rights (“IPR”) has a perilous role to play. Specifically, the success of India’s national development aspirations will depend on a court system and the competition Commission of India (“CCI”) to set enforcement standards and guidelines across the Intellectual Property Rights (“IPR”) regime associated with those initiatives. In this section we review decisions by Indian courts to explore emergence of any trends or standards of review.  Specifically, this paper explores how Indian courts have approached the Fair Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (“FRAND”) terms to adjudicate disputes arising from standard-essential patents (“SEPs”). Further, the paper compares and contrasts court decisions on disputes arising from SEP licensing under FRAND terms across various international jurisdictions to set a benchmark for considerations by Indian legal experts. The work outlines the multidimensional nature of IPR in relation to licensing SEPs which presents not only legal issues but also business, technology and associated government policy issues.