As part of a growing phenomenon, patent holders are\u00a0increasingly making voluntary, public commitments to limit their
\npatent\u2019s enforcement and other exploitation. While most of these\u00a0commitments are FRAND commitments, in which patent holders\u00a0promise to license their patents to manufacturers of standardized\u00a0products on terms that are \u201cfair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory,\u201d\u00a0a growing number of voluntary patent pledges\u00a0are made outside the scope of standard-setting organizations or\u00a0contexts. All of these voluntary public pledges seek to provide\u00a0some degree of assurance that users of the pledged patents will not\u00a0face patent litigation suits. However, the exact degree of assurance\u00a0depends on the legal theory applied to patent pledges. The\u00a0following article offers an overview of legal considerations for\u00a0voluntary patent pledges, which go beyond FRAND commitments.\u00a0These voluntary patent pledges have neither been tested in court\u00a0nor examined in great detail yet. The goal of this article is to\u00a0provide an overview of legal arguments based on United States\u00a0and German law for those who are considering the use and\u00a0reliance on of voluntary patent pledges.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As part of a growing phenomenon, patent holders are\u00a0increasingly making voluntary, public commitments to limit their patent\u2019s enforcement and other exploitation. While most of these\u00a0commitments are FRAND commitments, in which patent holders\u00a0promise to license their patents to manufacturers of standardized\u00a0products on terms that are \u201cfair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory,\u201d\u00a0a growing number of voluntary patent pledges\u00a0are made …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,68,72],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3978"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3978"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7227,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3978\/revisions\/7227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}