Utility models, like patents, are increasingly being declared as “essential” to global industry standards, licensed together with standards essential patents (SEPs), and now even enforced in litigation. This study finds that nearly 1,000 standards-essential utility models (SEUMs) have been declared essential to broadly adopted industry standards. And though far less than other SEPs, SEUMs have been subject to litigation in China and Germany, and there appears to be no structural barrier to their litigation in other jurisdictions. These findings raise questions concerning the legal requirement to disclose and license SEUMs, the value of SEUMs for purposes of calculating FRAND royalty rates for individual firm portfolios and for determining top-down aggregated royalty rates for standards, as well as larger questions concerning the use of UMs to protect complex technological inventions that are also covered by patents.

This chapter offers three case studies on recent disagreements in the bodies and committees of three SDOs, where procedural guarantees were at stake. These disagreements arose at three different “levels”: standards development, policy-making, and appeal procedures. The discussed disagreements were either resolved through the internal dispute resolution bodies of these SDOs, or escalated to litigation. In particular, this chapter attempts to reveal what can be learned from the experiences of stakeholders involved in these disagreements and concludes that, despite the different nature of these disputes, they arose from the (potential) exclusion of the relevant stakeholders from particular institutional processes.