There is a possible crisis brewing in India over the manner in which certain technology companies are wielding ‘standard essential patents’ (SEP) against the telecom manufacturing sector in India. This is a complex policy issue which has direct ramifications for India’s effort to build a domestic manufacturing industry for cellular phones. So far, the issues of regulating SEPs have been left to the judiciary, which, as an institution, has mostly missed the ball.
To begin with, it is important to understand the importance of SEPs. These are patents that cover technologies which are adopted by the industry as “standards”. For example, technologies such as CDMA, GSM, LTE are all industry standards in the telecom sector. Such technological standards are especially important to ensure interoperability of different brands of cellular phones manufactured by different companies. For example, once GSM was adopted as a standard, all manufacturers had to ensure that the handsets that they manufactured were compatible with GSM. Otherwise there would be no demand for their phones.
