Today marked the closing day of Via Licensing Alliance’s (Via’s) third-ever Via Business Summit, which took place at the Westin Excelsior Hotel in Rome this year. As well as tasting an array of Italian wines up in the hills of rural Lazio, ip fray, the official media partner, moderated a panel about EU standard-essential patent (SEP) policy and interviewed several high-profile IP executives on the sidelines of the event.
Below is a short breakdown of the highlights from the half-day conference, which took place yesterday:
Via’s business update
During his first opening remarks as President at a Via Summit, Kevin Mack announced changes to the pool administrator’s leadership team, including the appointment of Hélène Jay as the head of global licensing, and Willy Chang as VP and head of strategy and growth. He emphasized Via’s dual focus: “To help innovators create new and exciting technology” and “make technology more accessible”. He also noted that the company’s new and biggest initiative at the moment is AI and data centers.
AI was also at the heart of the company’s “business update” session, which featured Mr. Mack, alongside Ms. Jay and Mr. Chang, and revealed that of the 2,900 licensees that Via now manages, 56 have joined since October. They also noted that the AVC program, which remains dominant in streaming, recently released new royalty rates, while the ATSC 3.0 program will be deployed in Brazil this year.
But as the company continues to expand and forays into new markets (such as in the memory market: January 15, 2026 ip fray article), several of its licensors are also now embroiled in enforcement actions (10 actions ongoing to be precise), including, most recently, IP Bridge and Dolby against China’s Skyworth (February 1, 2026 ip fray article).
Mr. Chang added that Via has made significant progress with its DRAM patent program, which is expected to launch soon (the first in its new semiconductor pool series).
UK court ‘double standards’
The panel moderated by ip fray discussed some of the biggest issues in the SEP space right now, especially with the current jurisdictional and policy tensions across the world. The panel emphasized the importance of transparency – both in the policy context and in licensing negotiations, to enable trust between patentees and implementers.
The panel, which featured Magali Fitzgibbon, Legal and Governance Director at ETSI, and Dr. Nina Belbl, a Legal Officer at WIPO, also received a few questions from the audience – including from Eeva Hakoranta (former Chief Licensing Officer at InterDigital: April 7, 2025 ip fray article).
Ms. Hakoranta expressed frustration over some of the recent events in the UK courts involving interim licenses. She recalled when, during her first few months at InterDigital, the company was issued an anti-suit injunction (ASI) by the Wuhan Intermediate People’s Court (China), which sparked a chain of reactions across the SEP space. Now, she noted, the UK courts have “double standards”. If a court is allowed to call a licensor unwilling for not accepting interim licensing, they should also call out unwilling licensees – for instance, when they have refused to arbitrate, she said.
Diverging global SEP litigation developments
The final panel, which was moderated by Sullivan & Cromwell’s Garrard Beeney, featured patent litigators from across the world: Bardehle Pagenberg’s (ip fray firm profile) Volkmar Henke, Devlin Law Firm’s Tim Devlin, EIP’s (ip fray firm profile) Tom Brazier, and Licks Attorneys’ (ip fray firm profile) Carlos Aboim.
Each of the litigators presented diverging opinions on the essentiality of SEP injunctions, as well as the importance of a FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) commitment in an injunction evaluation.
In the U.S., where there has been no commission-enforced injunctive relief decision in years, a case between Wilus and Askey in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas (March 6, 2026 ip fray article) is expected to test the position of the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the United States Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division.
In Germany, the Unified Patent Court and Brazil, things are a little different. Brazil, especially, tends not to favor other jurisdictions determining FRAND rates (see March 7, 2026 ip fray article). Meanwhile, the Federal Court of Justice of Germany recently upheld SEP case law previously established in Sisvel v. Haier I & II in a case between VoiceAge EVS and HMD, ruling that the latter was an unwilling licensee (January 27, 2026 ip fray article). A constitutional complaint has since been filed by the implementer against the Federal Court (March 16, 2026 ip fray article).
Finally, in the UK, there have so far been no FRAND cases initiated by patentees. However, there are several cases where patentees have fought back by seeking (successfully) their own interim-license declarations, such as Huawei against TP-Link last month (February 5, 2026 ip fray article) and Nokia against Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount a couple of weeks later (February 26, 2026 ip fray article).