What To Expect From USPTO’s Essential Patent Group

Sterne Kessler Directors Melissa Haapala and Ryan Richardson spoke to Law360 on the new Standard-Essential Patent (SEP) Working Group out of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

With a potential new policy statement prompted by the working group, Richardson commented that it is likely that courts reading previous policy statements would “put a fair amount of stock into them,” but “we just don’t have decisions on that to say that this was a thing that tipped the scales in one way or the other.”

Haapala spoke to the new SEP working group’s initiatives, commenting that “raising awareness with these smaller medium-sized enterprises is important, because it may be something that these companies haven’t thought of.”