Patent Glossary

Patent - A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude third parties from making, using, or selling the patent-protected invention for a limited period of time and a specific geographical zone in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention. Patents are a huge source of technical information around the world, enabling the sharing of knowledge about innovation and innovative technological solutions.
Standard / Technical standard - A technical standard is an established norm or requirement for a repeatable technical task or that ensures interoperability between technical devices, which is applied to a common and repeated use of rules, conditions, guidelines or characteristics for products or related processes and production methods, and related management systems practices.Standards make everyday life better by enabling compatibility of products and services available around us. To do this, standards must select from different technical alternatives and choose a single technical solution from a multitude of possibilities for a given technical problem.
Standard Essential Patents – A standard-essential patent (SEP) is a patent that claims an invention that must be used to comply with a technical standard. A patent is a monopoly, so a SEP owner would have the power to block the use of a technical standard. To prevent this, SEP owners promise to – and are required to – offer a FRAND (Fair Reasonable And Non Discriminatory) license to all who use the standard.
FRAND terms - Fair, Reasonable, And Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms, denote a voluntary licensing commitment that standards organizations request from the owner of an intellectual property right (usually a patent) that is, or may become, essential to practice a technical standard.
SEP FRAND License - A License to a patent or patent portfolio that is declared essential to a standard (i.e. a SEP), where the owner does not disagree before standardization especially where the owner promised that the patent be subject to a commitment to license under FRAND conditions. That license has to be granted to any willing licensee on a Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms.
Willing Licensee - An implementer that is prepared to enter into an SEP license on FRAND terms.
Injunction (and injunction threat) - A judicial order restraining a person (including legal person) from beginning or continuing an action threatening or invading the legal right of another, or compelling a person to carry out a certain act, e.g. to make restitution to an injured party.
Patent Troll / NPE (Non-Practicing Entity) - A company that obtains the rights to one or more patents in order to make significant profit by means of licensing or litigation, rather than by producing its own goods or services.
Forum shopping: The systematic abus of co-existing jurisdictions for the sake of certain legal advantages. In the case of alleged infringements of property rights of standard-essential patents, in Germany various regional courts can be appeled to. In the past, the Regional Courts of Düsseldorf and Munich had to deal with a particularly large number of cases involving SEP issues.

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Patent-Glossar

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