Introduction
Jackson Lin is the Vice President of the Wispro Group and the firm’s lead consultant. His areas of expertise include cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), natural language search processing, IP lifecycle, and medical devices.
Wispro is a professional consulting firm that specializes in providing intellectual property (IP) consulting, patent prosecution, and international business law services to its clients.
This year, Jackson is focusing on IP applications for his clients. At the same time, he is also focusing on researching 5G SEP trends.
Who Should Monitor 5G SEP Trends Closely?
Firstly, 5G SEP owners should keep an eye on 5G SEP trends because they not only need to discover more about themselves but also their competitors. Having a full understanding of their patent portfolios allows them to realize the level and number of qualitative patents, thus enabling them to discover more about their position and ranking amongst all of their worldwide competitors. Additionally, they can find out more about the similarity of their patent portfolio compared to others.
With this kind of comparative analyses, 5G SEP owners can figure out whom they can form alliances with, as well as who their main competitors are. Even more importantly, they can decide on whether they need to increase investment in their R&D efforts.
Secondly, there are the potential and current investors in 5G SEPs who usually focus on whether they should increase their investment in certain investees. This group doesn’t have any R&D resources, but they’re typically interested in investing in companies that are developing new technologies and new SEPs. To a further extent, they may even seek out any high-quality and high-value SEPs, and acquire them via M&A. By doing so, they can assert these patents to obtain royalty fees from others, or even resell these SEPs to earn extra income.
Finally, we have companies with an interest in 5G SEPs. They may take advantage of the SEPs of others to help speed up their R&D processes, resulting in the commercialization of their products. They may want to find out more about how to pay royalties, what a reasonable price to pay is, and how many entities they should purchase. Alternatively, if they pay a royalty to a 5G SEP owner, they may also want to know how much money they should pay.
We think it’s meaningful and beneficial to research 5G SEPs trends and to focus on these three primary target audiences.
How Do You Monitor and Research 5G SEPs?
All 5G SEP owners must take part in 3GPP, which is a global organization that develops standards for mobile. Under the policy of intellectual property rights, all members should submit SEP-related patents to ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute.) Both 3GPP and ETSI serve as the primary sources for our data; we extract two types of information from these databases: patent information and standards of technology.
Since the patent information from ETSI is not sufficient enough to conduct a thorough analysis, we take the patent data from ETSI and utilize a third-party service called Patentcloud, along with data from patent offices, for more public information, such as patent families, legal statuses, transaction records, and the litigation history.
We also take the standard data, including name, number, and version and link it with the TS (technology specification) from 3GPP and ETSI, and track the consistency of the TS version and content.
With the data mentioned above (the patent information and the standards information from 3GPP and ETSI), we can provide comprehensive infographics, large amounts of useful information, and insightful analytics.
How Do You Use Patentcloud to Support Your Daily Tasks?
Patentcloud not only helps us to search for patents, but it also helps us to extract the vital information that ETSI lacks. With the patent information, such as the application number, application date, and publication date obtained from 3GPP and ETSI, we begin by cleansing the data. After a thorough cleansing, this data is processed via data normalization to unify the data format. Finally, we import the patent list into Patentcloud and the patent office systems to export the information that we need.
For example, when a patent owner submits SEPs to ETSI, we may want to find out more about the family size of these SEPs. We use Patentcloud to examine the family members of these SEPs to find out if all (or some) of the members have been submitted.
Additionally, since ETSI lacks real-time patent legal-status data, we can also use Patentcloud to extract the most up-to-date legal-status data. As a result, we can carry out further and more in-depth analysis based on the current legal status data.
At the same time, when the SEP is submitted, we can instantly discover its current status (whether it is under prosecution, issued, or abandoned.) Even after a patent has been submitted, we can find out whether the patent owner continued to maintain the patent, or if it was revoked after issuance.
We can also gain a better understanding of how the submitted SEPs were acquired. For example, whether they have been developed and filed by the same assignee as the original owner, or they had been acquired from other entities (these different methods are crucial to us.)
With the help of Patentcloud, we can extract useful information, such as patent families, legal status, and transaction records, to better understand the current owner, the original owner, the coverage, and the size of the patent family.
Connect with Jackson on LinkedIn
