InterDigital’s Rob Stien on How Patent Hold-Out is Undermining America’s Innovators
Patent hold-out is a problem that continues to hamstring innovators in the U.S. and beyond, InterDigital’s Chief Public Policy and Communications Officer Rob Stien detailed in an editorial in RealClearPolicy. When a company delays taking a license to utilize an innovator’s patents, it often drags patent owners into long and costly litigation and disrupts the innovation lifecycle through which companies use licensing to generate a return on their R&D to help fuel future innovation.
For the last two years the American company Sonos, a leading player in the connected speaker market, has been embroiled in high-stakes litigation with Google, after accusing the tech giant of infringing several of its patents.
This fight is taking place in courtrooms in the U.S. and Europe and, for the most part, the tide has been turning towards Sonos, especially following a January decision from the International Trade Commission (ITC). The ITC recently upheld a decision to issue an exclusion order preventing the importation of Google products that had been found to infringe five of Sonos’s patents.
Despite that ruling, Google has yet to take a license to Sonos’s patent portfolio – just the latest example of how patent hold-out harms U.S. innovators. You can read more in Rob’s complete editorial on RealClearPolicy, here.
