Context: Last month, Via Licensing Alliance (LA) hosted its third annual Bridge Summit in San Francisco (August 29, 2025 ip fray article), during which the company announced its plans to launch several patent licensing programs that focus on semiconductor technologies – the first of which will focus on licensing memory patents (September 25, 2025 ip fray article).
What’s new: Via LA’s President Heath Hoglund sat down with ip fray to reflect on how the Summit, the biggest one to date, went, including a panel featuring Mr. Hoglund and fellow patent pool administrator heads Pete Moller (Access Advance) and Mattia Fogliacco (Sisvel). Additionally, Mr. Hoglund shared his views on the European Commission’s stance on licensing negotiation groups (LNGs) in the draft technology transfer guidelines, as well as how the semiconductor patent pool programs came to be.
The Bridge Summit was “truly a success”, Mr. Hoglund says, smiling. “It included hundreds of attendees from a lot of categories, including licensors for the pool meetings, and important licensees such as TCL, Xiaomi, and Huawei.”
Some of the highlights included a keynote by former United States Patent and Trademark Office director David J. Kappos (now of Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP), which Mr. Hoglund describes as a “standout”:
“He’s so plugged into the policy and regulatory discussions. It’s interesting to hear what he thinks is going to happen and to have his high-level view of how the world is changing.”
The event also featured a variety of cultural and social events, including a baseball game at Oracle Park between the St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants, which was “good fortune”, especially for the attendees from Japan and South Korea, who are huge baseball fans, according to Mr. Hoglund. The LG Twins, owned by LG, and the Samsung Lions, owned by Samsung, are two leading teams in the KBO League (Korea’s National professional baseball league), while Japan is home to the Yomiuri Giants, which is the San Francisco Giants’ sister team.
Via’s pool collaborations
Another highlight from the conference was a three-way panel between Mr. Hoglund, Sisvel’s Mattia Fogliacco, and Access Advance’s Pete Moller – moderated by Dolby’s General Counsel Andy Sherman.
Via LA’s Bridge Summit is expressly under Chatham House rules, so the details of the panel cannot be publicly disclosed.
However, the biggest takeaway from the panel was that everyone agreed that LNGs are a “bad idea”, Mr. Hoglund says. The European regulatory debate over this issue came up, alongside what makes pools successful, and the usual question about having multiple pools for the same technology.
“People were looking for some fireworks between us, but it was actually very cordial,” he adds.
Outside of conferences, Via LA has not collaborated often with other pools. However, one recent success was its strategic partnership with ULDAGE, a Japanese patent pool administrator that mainly focuses on digital broadcasting and emerging sectors (like EV charging), to help expand Via LA’s EV Charging patent pool in Japan (February 18, 2025 ip fray article). The partnership, which is still in its early days, is aiming to attract licensors, automotive manufacturers, and technology implementers.
“It’s been a successful partnership, and all the credit is due to ULDAGE,” Mr. Hoglund says.
The pool administrator would be open to doing more of such collaborations, where it makes sense, he adds, noting that it’s not necessarily a “zero-sum game” and that there are opportunities where two pool administrators can have success at the same time.
“And we are 100% doing that sort of thing where it makes sense.”
LNG woes
The same week of the Summit, Sisvel’s founder Roberto Dini wrote a piece about the issues surrounding the European Commission’s stance on LNGs in the draft technology transfer guidelines (September 29, 2025 POLITICO article).
While Via LA has not yet had any experience with negotiating with LNGs, Mr. Hoglund shared most of Mr. Dini’s views:
“Pools work really hard to find a compromise in terms of royalty rate that is acceptable to the market. The pools themselves have no ability to enforce – we have no ability to force the licensees into taking a license. So when you see a pool that starts to gain market acceptance on a royalty rate, what has happened is there is market acceptance of what that rate is.”
One of the things pools require (because of antitrust guidelines) is for licensors to offer a bilateral license in addition to a pool offering. So licensees always have the option to take a bilateral license if they don’t think the pool works for them, he explains.
The problem with LNGs, Mr. Hoglund believes, is that for a big chunk of licensees, it is their “game to delay as much as possible in becoming a licensee”. The longer their wait, the more money they save, is their thought process, he adds, but in a market where a pool is successfully gaining licensees, the only thing LNGs are doing is “providing another vehicle for holdout licensees” to extend the term of their holdout.
“It’s just really a serial way of further delaying a real engagement with the pools,” he says. “But where there is a pool with reasonable market success, the LNG really needs reminding… we can’t go give them a better deal than everyone else – then that would be unfair.”
‘Organic’ and ‘clearly defined’: the semiconductor opportunity
Mr. Hoglund is particularly excited about being able to announce the plans for the new semiconductor patent licensing programs. The company is at a stage where it is actively engaging with licensors and licensees on it, while he and Willy Chang, Via LA’s vice president of program management, are setting pacing guidelines on where the program should be in the future.
He notes that one of the essential elements for having a successful pool is having a clear target for what you are going to license – MPEG LA has tried to do biotech-focused programs, but these are “tricky” because there’s “no clear target”.
In the memory space, however, there are a number of companies that manufacture memory and many that use that memory. For that kind of market to function, you must have a well-defined standard for how the memory communicates with other devices – and that has to be very clearly standardized.
“There is a lot of opportunity for innovation and technology, and it’s very clearly defined, so there ends up being a very clearly-defined body of relevant IP,” he says.
In looking for opportunities, Via LA wanted to go somewhere others hadn’t been before, but something that clearly sits within that profile. The company already boasts several experts in semiconductors, so the idea for such programs came up organically. Mr. Hoglund adds:
“I am proud because we figured it out organically and internally.”