Guest:
Luke is an intellectual property attorney with 15 years of experience negotiating collaborative solutions for patent holders and technology developers. He was involved in some of the very early standard essential patent litigations representing Nortel and Ericsson working as an associate and then a principal at the law firm McKool Smith in Dallas. Luke went on to work for Ericsson where he led the company’s North American patent licensing business. In this role, he helped develop and license Ericsson’s patent portfolio, analyzing and valuing patent portfolios in multiple technology areas such as wireless connectivity, codecs, data networks, and security, and advocating policy positions to legislative bodies, competition agencies, standard-setting organizations, and other forums. Today Luke is the Senior Vice President – Business Development at Avanci, a licensor collective program for 2G, 3G and 4G SEPs for the automotive application.
“The Avanci 5G patent pool is set to launch in 2022”
In the interview Luke elaborates on the licensing model of Avanci and how they solved the chicken and egg problem with having first company join as licensors (8 initial members) and having BMW as the first automotive OEM to become a licensee. Luke also elaborated on the revenue sharing model among the SEP licensors and that they go beyond simple patent counting but also use other indicators of SEP value such as standard contributions as well as patent portfolios that have been successfully licensed before.
Luke identifies challenges with licensing SEP to automotive OEMs due to earlier agreements in the supply chain where the costs of SEP royalties were not considered. Now OEMs have to go back to the suppliers to negotiate to share the costs of the SEP license. Often, when OEMs and suppliers come to an agreement about how these costs are shared, OEMs are set to join Avanci.
Luke also discusses how a one stop shop license program such as Avanci benefits the IoT industry and that Avanci will launch a 5G patent pool next year. This 5G patent pool will likely have different offerings in terms of technology packages to accommodate the different use cases of connectivity in a car.
