On 13th February 2020 the NGMN IPR Forum held its latest plenary meeting in Sophia-Antipolis, kindly hosted by ETSI. The Plenary was organized as an open workshop allowing also non-partners of NGMN to participate in the exchange of views.

Main discussion topics were the daft NGMN recommendations for promoting a sustainable 5G IPR licensing ecosystem. In line with the Business Objectives of Chapter 7 of the NGMN White Paper, 2015, recommendations are made related to Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). The recommendations were to promote a licensed 5G ecosystem through sound commercial IPR licenses and good-faith negotiations, to improve the transparency of Standard Essential Patents (SEP) declarations to 5G SDO, to build trust in Standard Essential Patents (SEP) declarations to 5G SDO by reporting on essentiality checks, and  to adapt and expand the patent pooling governance and services for 5G.

In addition the European Commission reported on the outcome of the pilot project for essentiality checks of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs). The objective of this study is to assess the feasibility of a system that ensures better essentiality scrutiny for SEPs. This includes both the technical feasibility, how better scrutiny possibly could be carried out and institutional feasibility, which institutions could possibly set-up and implement a system of better scrutiny. The final report on the study might be available by end of March 2020.