With increasing standardization of digital technologies, standard-essential patents (SEPs) have become a thorny and critical issue for high-tech companies. SEPs implicate unique legal issues and create tensions between the territorial limits of patent rights and the global reach of standardized technologies. With foreign jurisdictions asserting broader authority in this arena, SEP disputes can raise complicated questions of international law.

In this article, Nick Schuneman, Amol Parikh, Henrik Holzapfel, Laura Katharina Woll and Daniel Sternberg examine the different – and diverging – legal regimes on SEPs and their corresponding fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing obligations in two key geographic regions: the United States and Europe / the United Kingdom.