Juliette Rouilloux-Sicre, vice president of intellectual property at Thales, was at the heart of one of the most closely watched sagas in standard essential patent litigation this year.
The French electrical manufacturer had SEP owners worried when it argued that Philips’ efforts to seek an exclusion order at the US International Trade Commission violated its commitment to license SEPs on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.
Thales asked the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to step in after Philips sued at the ITC and the District Court for the District of Delaware.
If the Federal Circuit had sided with Thales, it could have amounted to a ban on SEP owners seeking injunctive relief at the ITC.
Coupled with the landmark eBay ruling, which effectively put injunctions out of reach in SEP district court litigation, the case could have severely limited SEP owners’ enforcement options.
It didn’t quite turn out that way, but neither has the question been settled just yet.
The Federal Circuit declined to rule one way or the other on the SEP issue, largely because the ITC never actually issued an exclusion order.
The ambiguous ruling leaves the door open for other defendants to follow Thales’s lead and pose the question again in future.
