An essential patent is a patent

Patent

A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....

 which discloses and claims

Claim (patent)

Patent claims are the part of a patent or patent application that defines the scope of protection granted by the patent. The claims define, in technical terms, the extent of the protection conferred by a patent, or the protection sought in a patent application...

 one or more inventions that are required to practice a given industry standard. Standardisation bodies, therefore, often require members disclose and grant licenses to patents and pending patent applications that they own and that cover a standard that the body is developing. Failure to do so is a form of patent misuse

Patent misuse

In United States patent law, patent misuse is an affirmative defense used in patent litigation when a defendant has been accused to have infringed a patent. It has also been used to mitigate damages following a finding of infringement or justify a failure to pay contracted-for royalties...

.

If standards bodies fail to get licenses to all patents that are essential to practicing a standard, then the owners of those unlicensed patents can often demand royalties from those who ultimately adopt the standards. This is what happened, for example, to the GIF

GIF

The Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability....

 and JPEG

JPEG

In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....

 standards.

See also

• Patent ambush
  Patent ambush
  A patent ambush occurs when a member of a standard-setting organization withholds information, during participation in development and setting a standard, about a patent that the member or the member's company owns, has pending, or intends to file, which is relevant to the standard, and...
  
  , a situation where a member of a standards organization withholds information about patents they own during development of a proposed standard and subsequently claims them to be relevant to the standard as adopted.
• Patent map
  Patent map
  A patent map is a graphical model of patent visualisation. This practice "enables companies to identify the patents in a particular technology space, verify the characteristics of these patents, and .....
  
  
• Patent pool
  Patent pool
  In patent law, a patent pool is a consortium of at least two companies agreeing to cross-license patents relating to a particular technology. The creation of a patent pool can save patentees and licensees time and money, and, in case of blocking patents, it may also be the only reasonable method...
  
  
• Patent thicket
  Patent thicket
  A patent thicket is "a dense web of overlapping intellectual property rights that a company must hack its way through in order to actually commercialize new technology," or, in other words, "“an overlapping set of patent rights” which require innovators to reach licensing deals for multiple patents...
  
  

External links

• "Potential Antitrust Liability Based on a Patent Owner's Manipulation of Industry Standard Setting", Proceedings of ABA Antitrust Section Spring Meeting (2003) by Janice M. Mueller.
• "Patent Misuse Through the Capture of Industry Standards", 17 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 623 (2002) by Janice M. Mueller.