Wednesday, May 12, 2021
Next week's European Commission webinar on SEP enforcement: speakers include USPTO's chief policy officer Mary Critharis (and yours truly, too)
On Wednesday (May 19, 2021), the fifth webinar of the European Commission's popular series on standard-essential patent (SEP) topics will be held. Its title is "Enforcement of Standard-Essential Patents - current bottlenecks and possible solutions." In a previous post I mentioned I was going to be among the speakers.
Meanwhile, the EC's Directorate-General for the Internal Market (DG GROW) has published the agenda. After Judge Edgar Brinkman's (The Hague) welcome speech, Mary Critharis, the Chief Policy Offier and Director for International Affairs of the United States Patent & Trademark Office will deliver a keynote addressd. I'm sure many of you will be as interested as I am in listening to Mrs. Critharis's speech. After a recent decision by the DOJ to downgrade an implementer-hostile policy statement by Trump's antitrust chief, many want to find out about the Biden Administration's stance on SEP enforcement. IP policy in general, and SEP policy in particular, is shaped by multiple U.S. government agencies, among them the USPTO, of course.