Apportioning For The Standard When Valuing Standards-Essential Patents

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), a national research organization of Australia, recently filed a petition for certiorari with the Supreme Court. CSIRO presents the following question: Is the Federal Circuit's promulgation of rigid legal rules to control the weight to be given by the trier of fact to evidence of patent infringement damages proper under 35 U.S.C. § 284?¹

HISTORY OF THE CASE

CSIRO owns U.S. Patent No. 5,487,069 (the '069 patent), which covers technology designed to solve the problem of multipath interference in wireless communications.² The '069 patent was incorporated into several of the 802.11 series of wireless communication standards, including 802.11a and 802.11g.³ CSIRO initially agreed to license the '069 patent on reasonable and nondiscriminatory (RAND) terms during the 802.11a standardization process, but repeatedly refused related requests for future iterations of the standard.⁴ In the past several