Apple’s long-term campaign to avoid paying FRAND SEP licensing fees continues unabated. In what has become a modus operendi, every time Apple’s license with a major SEP licensors – Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, InterDigital, Qualcomm – comes up for renewal, global warfare breaks out, and then after forcing SEP licensors to pay millions in legal fees, Apple settles for unknown, typically after being found by a court or the ITC to be an “unwilling” technology user who failed to negotiate in good faith.

Is this what awaits? Last year, I described the broad negative and anticompetitive consequences of the IEEE’s 2015 patent policy, and was pleased to see the U.S. Department of Justice’s important 2020 Business Review Letter to IEEE (“DOJ BRL”) cite to my empirical work (see FN 47).

I find it fascinating that lawyers and other lobbyists involved with SEPs get so worked up in their policy preferences that they start to have blinders that automatically insert their preferences into texts where those preferences are no where to be seen.