With information from Reuters.

On Tuesday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reported that Ericsson did not breach its obligation to offer HTC licenses to its telecommunications rivals for its 2G, 3G and 4G wireless patents on fair and reasonable terms.

In this regard, US Circuit Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod emphasized to a unanimous panel of three judges that HTC did not demonstrate that Ericsson’s proposed license was out of line with its licenses to similar companies.

Ericsson spokesman Urban Fjellestad said in an email that the company he represents was pleased with the decision, since in his opinion, patent owners seeking fair compensation for the technology they have invested will allow them to reinvest in new creations. .

It should be noted that Ericson and his counterpart had signed three cross-licensing agreements for their essential standard patents and use them on their respective mobile devices from 2003 to 2014, but when negotiating a new license in 2016, Ericsson offered HTC a fee of $ 2.50. per 4G device, and in 2017, HTC responded with an offer of $ .10 per device, arguing that the fee should be based on the smallest marketable unit practicing the patents, which in this case was supposedly the baseband processor that allows mobile phones to connect to cellular networks.

Faced with this situation, Ericsson said the offer was “so far from the norm” that it “cooled” the negotiations. Consequently, HTC sued Ericsson in federal court in East Texas a few days after the meeting, alleging that Ericsson had breached its international obligation to license its standard essential patents on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms (FRAND). After HTC rejected its second offer, Ericsson claimed that HTC had not negotiated in good faith and requested a declaratory judgment that its offers were FRAND.

After several disputes, HTC argued that Ericsson’s licenses with companies such as Apple Inc, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Huawei Technologies Co Ltd were more favorable than Ericsson’s offers, but the lawyer said those companies were not in a similar situation to HTC.

Finally, the panel also affirmed the rejection of the jury’s instruction proposed by HTC to distribute the value of Ericsson’s patents from the non-patented features of HTC phones to determine whether Ericsson’s proposal was FRAND. HTC’s instructions were incorrectly based on United States patent law, rather than French contract law, which governs the relevant international standard, and even if United States law applied, none of the proposed instructions would have been necessary.