Standard Essential Patents (SEPs)

2020.08.03 Daniel Kuo

According to BusinessWire, Versatile Video Coding (VVC) became a standard on July 6, 2020, and will be published as an ITU-T Recommendation H.266 by the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector ITU-T. On July 22, 2020, the Media Coding Industry Forum (MC-IF) issued meeting invitations to the companies owning patents or patent applications, which are potential standard-essential patents (SEPs) for fostering the formation of a single VVC patent pool. According to the release from MC-IF, they wish to avoid a repetition of the fragmentation found today in the patent licensing market for the previous standard—High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). The fragmentation caused by...

2020.07.10 Alvyn Lin

Chaotic Traffic vs. Self-Driving Testing, what do you think? According to recent reports, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has announced the “Automated Vehicles Transparency and Engagement for Safe Testing Initiative (AV Testing Initiative)”. This initiative serves to provide an “online platform for sharing self-driving system road test activities” to raise public awareness about self-driving cars. The public can use this platform to understand the test activities of self-driving cars, such as test data including time, location, frequency, number of vehicles, and routes, etc. Currently, there are nine self-driving companies and eight state governments that are participating in the...

2020.06.25 Jean Chou

Tesla vs. Nikola? Lithium Batteries vs. Fuel Cells? WISPRO Manager Jean Chou: Both Have Their Advantages, Market Segmentation Is the Key to the Success of Electric Vehicles [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="750"] Photo credit: Nikola Corp.[/caption] Tesla and Nikola are two electric vehicle companies, one focuses on lithium battery vehicles, and the other focuses on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Although they are both named after Nikola Tesla⁠—the inventor of the AC system⁠—these two companies never seem to be able to get along with each other. Not long after Nikola went public, Tesla’s founder Elon Musk popped up and told everyone again...

2020.06.18 Eugene Lu

WIPO Offers Latest Digital Time-Stamping Service for Intellectual Property Related Documents Have you ever searched high and low for decisive, non-patent literature, valuable for invalidating a patent plaintiff’s claim, only to be challenged with the effective publication date of the prior art in court?  Has the effective date of your R&D laboratory notes been contested by your opposition in an interference/ derivation proceeding that fights for prior inventorship? While the scenarios mentioned above may seem remote to many of us, in this generation of the digital age, lots of valuable intellectual assets are produced in the form of digital files....

2020.06.16 Patrick Liu

China’s Zero-Emission Business Opportunities [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="750"] Photo credit: Toyota[/caption] The carbon footprint has always played an essential role in global environmental protection issues. In recent years, the rapid growth of the electric vehicle field has also reflected the automotive industry’s determination to keep up with the world’s environmental protection trends. However, regarding zero-emission, in addition to electric vehicles that only consume electricity and not oil, the market has another option: fuel cells that use alternative energy. According to reports, Toyota—which is the leading global automotive company—and five other Chinese automotive companies (BAIC, GAC, FAW, Dongfeng, and SinoHytec), recently set up a joint venture called United Fuel...

2020.06.12 Leo Tsou

How Does One Avoid Being Deceived by Medical Academic Scandals? WISPRO Manager Leo Tsou: Scientific Findings in the Medical Field Need Time to Accumulate, Track Records Are Not Easy to Fake. Earlier this month, two of the world’s leading medical journals—The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine—retracted articles related to Covid-19 studies based on data provided by the small US company, Surgisphere. Those journals retracted their articles because the data provided by Surgisphere was found to contain artificial traces, and Surgisphere refused to provide raw data to the co-authors and peer review auditors. The article published by The...

2020.06.11 Alvyn Lin

Could Heterogeneous Integration Become the Standard in the Semiconductor Industry? According to WISPRO Manager Steven Chang: Industry News and Patent Data Suggest Heterogeneous Integration Is the Key Technology for the Future. As 5G, AI, self-driving vehicles, and data centers are becoming commercialized in various application scenarios. The end product clients (e.g., Apple, Google) are playing a more involved role in chip design, leading to a significant shift in the status quo of the semiconductor supply chain. Subsequently, the IC designers will be requested on demand for diverse and highly customized chips from the end clients. In such a manner, heterogenous integration...

2020.06.09 Daniel Kuo

New Video Coding Standard Released. WISPRO Analyst Daniel Kuo: Be Aware of the Licensing Conditions When Selecting From Multiple Standards According to Display Daily, the Essential Video Coding (EVC) standard led by Huawei, Qualcomm, and Samsung was officially released in April 2020. Additionally, the development of Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standards will also be completed in due course. The next generation of video coding technology is a competitive situation. The supporters, the business models, and the licensing strategies of all parties will influence whether the standard will succeed in the future. Besides VVC, EVC, and AV1—led by Google and other entities—the previous technical standards, including High-efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and Advanced Video Coding (AVC),...