The EU withdraws the planned SEP regulation

The European Commission has announced that it was withdrawing its proposal for a regulation on Standard Essential Patents. The proposal had already been approved by the European Parliament in February 2024, but was still pending approval by the EU Member States. 

The European Commission has announced that due to lack of consensus among stakeholders, it would withdraw the proposal for now as there seemed to be little chances that it would be approved and made into law in the form it currently has.  What are the next steps? It is not clear for now, and the Commission will look into whether to modify the SEP Regulation proposal, or adopt “another type of approach” in its own words. 

Standard Essential Patents are specific patents which must be used by manufacturers in a particular industry to comply with industry standards, thereby giving to their holder great power on the market related to these standards. The planned regulation therefore sought to regulate the ways in which SEPs are used and enforced in the European market. 

Under the proposed regulation, the Commission had planned to set up an SEP database in which holders of Standard Essential Patents would have to register their SEPs in which they would have been subject to non-binding “essentiality check” performed by the European Intellectual Property Office.