How Advanced Data on Standard Essential Patents Can Minimize Risk and Maximize Value

One of the key challenges facing the licensing market for standard essential patents is the over-declaration of patent families in fast-moving technology sectors, such as 4G and 5G mobile telecommunications. Difficulties arise whenever there is a surge in the number of declared families as it makes it challenging for both parties in the licensing negotiation to sift through the huge patent lists and attribute the correct value to SEPs. 

Blanket declarations can be equally problematic in other technology sectors—such as Wi-Fi and audio-video codec—where declarations have been registered without any specific mention of the patents in question, making the process of identifying and analyzing standard essential patents less than straightforward. 

At the same time, there is a huge inconsistency in royalty rates across the market, with some SEP owners—whether a company, non-practicing entity (NPE), or patent pool—charging a percentage of the product's selling price or a fixed price per unit and others demanding excessively high royalty rates. 

An inability to check whether a standard essential patent is truly essential, or its royalty rate fair, can lead to a lack of trust between parties, which in turn can result in negotiation delays and the looming threat of injunction or costly litigation. Moreover, such disputes are now increasingly expanding to multiple jurisdictions, and the outcomes are hard to predict due to inconsistent court judgments across the jurisdictions and use of different frameworks for calculating royalty rates.  

We developed our Standard Essential Patent Data & Analytics Database to help overcome these hurdles. Currently, it includes nearly 20,000 5G standard essential patent families and more than 15,000 4G SEP families that have each been manually reviewed by a team of telecommunications professionals. By creating the database internally, we also ensured the absence of bias required for it to serve as a neutral and trustworthy reference point for both licensors and licensees. 

The manual analysis for the new SEP Database was performed by the Concur IP team, a leading IP consulting company based in India that became part of the Questel group in early 2019. The team holds deep industry expertise and is renowned for its SEP-related capabilities, with its studies used to resolve many high-profile disputes across the world.

Users of our powerful patent search and analysis platform Orbit Intelligence (as well as the innovative SaaS-based platform Patently) can access our manually curated database of standard essential patents, including the ability to apply robust filters and combine new SEP fields with existing Orbit search fields effortlessly. 

• New standard essential patent fields have been added to advanced search 

• Users can search and filter by technology, declaration date, standard number, claim type, and status 

• Information is displayed in the standards tab 

As of February 2025, Orbit Intelligence will also include a new SEP 'Key Facts' dashboard to enable users to analyze a specific set of standard essential patents, including the ability to take a deep dive into declaration and essentiality data.

More technologies will be added to our Standard Essential Patent Data & Analytics Database, with Wi-Fi and audio-video codec SEPs to join our existing database of manually reviewed 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G standard essential patent families.