An objective measure of self-declared SEP quality remains elusive. One measure promoted in a few FRAND cases has been the quantity and quality of a self-declared SEP holder’s participation in the standardization process. Courts have been skeptical about these arguments for good reason. A comparison of the number of technical submissions made to a 5G technical specification with the number of patent families self-declared to that specification does not show sufficient correlation to support these arguments.
Top 10 Participants’ Approved Submission to Declared Families Ratio for TS 38.331
This graph shows the number of successful (green column) and unsuccessful (red column) technical submissions made by the top 10 participants working on 3GPP Technical Specification (TS) 38.331 regarding 5G NR radio resource control (RRC) and, as a ratio, the number of SEP families those participants self-declared to TS 38.331 per each successful technical submission.
Correlation between Technical Submissions and Declared SEP Families for Top 30 5G Technical Specifications by Submissions
The graph above compares the number of all successful technical submissions by 5G technical specifications to the number of all SEP families self-declared to such 5G technical specifications. This graph shows that there is effectively no correlation between standards technical submissions and self-declared SEPs.