An essential patent or standard-essential patent is a patent that claims an invention that must be used to comply with a technical standard. Standards organizations, therefore, often require members disclose and grant licenses to their patents and pending patent applications that cover a standard that the organization is developing. Failure to license an essential patent may be a form of patent misuse.
If a standards organization fails to get licenses to all patents that are essential to complying with a standard, owners of the unlicensed patents may demand or sue for royalties from companies that adopt the standard. This happened with to the GIF and JPEG standards, for example.
Determining which patents are essential to a particular standard can be complex.
Famous quotes containing the words essential and/or patent:
“Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)