Oneplus Technology (Shenzhen) Company, Ltd v Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Lord Justice Floyd,Lord Justice Males,Lord Justice Lewis |
| Judgment Date | 19 November 2020 |
| Neutral Citation | [2020] EWCA Civ 1562 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Civil Division) |
| Docket Number | Case No: A3/2020/1707 |
| Date | 19 November 2020 |
Lord Justice Floyd
Lord Justice Males
and
Lord Justice Lewis
Case No: A3/2020/1707
A3/2020/1719
IN THE COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
BUSINESS AND PROPERTY COURTS OF ENGLAND AND WALES
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LIST (ChD)
PATENTS COURT
(Sir Alastair Norris)
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
Daniel Piccinin (instructed by Taylor Wessing LLP) for the 1st to 5th Appellants
Daniel Alexander QC and Colin West QC (instructed by Kirkland & Ellis International LLP) for the 6 th to 9 th Appellants Sarah Abram and Michael Conway (instructed by Bird & Bird LLP) for the Respondents
Nicholas Saunders QC (instructed by Eversheds Sutherlands LLP) for two counterparty intervenors
Hearing date: 5 November 2020
Approved Judgment
Documents disclosed in the course of litigation under the CPR to an opposing party may only be used by that party for the purposes of that litigation unless they are read to or by the court, or referred to, at a hearing which has been held in public, the court gives permission or the party who disclosed the document and the person to whom the document belongs agree: CPR 31.22(1). In the vast majority of cases, this rule gives adequate protection against misuse of disclosure documents. It is not uncommon in intellectual property and other types of litigation, however, for highly confidential documents to be subject to more restrictive measures designed to prevent the documents from entering the public domain or being used for collateral purposes. These appeals are concerned with the treatment of commercially confidential materials in the context of litigation about standard essential patents (“SEPs”).
The first respondent (“Mitsubishi”) owns two out of the three allegedly standard essential patents with which this case is concerned, and which are alleged to be required for the implementation of the 3G and 4G mobile telecommunications standards. The second respondent (“Sisvel”) owns the third such patent, and administers all three of them. The patents are part of a wider SEP portfolio called the MCP Pool. The MCP Pool contains about 1000 patents in 10 different ownerships.
The appellants are all implementers of the 3G and 4G standards and sell telecommunications equipment. They fall, for the purposes of this appeal, into two groups. The first to fifth appellants (“Oppo”) form one such group, although there are two relevant companies within it: OnePlus and Oppo. The sixth to ninth appellants (“Xiaomi”) form another group. They are both large undertakings. Xiaomi is said to be the fourth largest smartphone manufacturer in the world. Another group, referred to as the Nuu defendants, were not parties to the appeal or actively involved in the applications below.
In a type of litigation which is becoming increasingly familiar in the Patents Court, the respondents sued Oppo and Xiaomi for infringement of their SEPs. In normal circumstances, a patentee who succeeds in establishing infringement and defending the validity of his patent is entitled to an injunction. Proprietors of SEPs will, however, have given an undertaking to the standards-setting organisation to grant licences under their SEPs to implementers of the relevant standards under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (“FRAND”) terms. Consistently with this, the respondents' position is that, if they succeed in their infringement claim, they are willing to grant licences to the appellants on their standard terms. They contend that they have already granted 23 such licences to implementers, (“the MCP Pool Licences”), and that from this fact alone it can be demonstrated that the terms on offer to the appellants are FRAND.
The approach to setting licence terms on the basis of other licences dealing with the same or similar subject matter is called the “comparables basis”. Licences which are precisely comparable to the one under consideration are not always available. Where there are differences in the relevant circumstances between the allegedly comparable licence and the licence the court is required to settle, the parties will deploy expert and other evidence to explain how the terms of the comparable need to be adjusted. This process is sometimes referred to as “unpacking”.
The appellants do not accept that they are infringers. They further contend that the terms which they have been offered are not FRAND. In particular, they say that the counterparties to the 23 MCP Pool Licences are much smaller enterprises than they are: they call them “minnows”. They are therefore not good comparables. They do not reflect the terms which would be FRAND for much larger organisations, which would have the financial wherewithal to negotiate more advantageous terms. They further contend that licences to portfolios other than the MCP Pool may be relevant in principle to setting the correct rate. That will be so, they contend, if the respondents or other members of the Pool have licensed sub-sets of the Pool. They hope that it will be possible to build a more reliable picture from those sub-set licences of the value of the patents in the Pool. They propose to unpack those sub-set licences which appear to be most relevant, and then re-synthesise the proper terms for a FRAND licence to fit their circumstances.
Issues of validity and infringement of the patents are due to be determined at a technical trial in March 2021. The issues concerned with what terms are FRAND, which will only arise if the patents are valid and infringed, are provisionally fixed to be decided at a trial in October 2021. These proceedings have generated separate “FRAND” pleadings.
The respondents applied to the court for further particulars of the FRAND cases of the appellants. In particular, they asked the appellants to say whether they intended to advance any positive case of what terms would be FRAND. The response of the appellants was to say that they could not do this until they had received full disclosure of all relevant licences and assignments (in addition to the 23 MCP Pool Licences which had already been disclosed).
At a case management conference before Mann J on 22 July 2020, the following regime was established:
i) the appellants were to provide an amended FRAND statement of case particularising any positive case they intended to make;
ii) if the appellants intended to advance a positive case based on comparable agreements, they were to identify and disclose any licences upon which they relied on their side and give full particulars of any reliance placed on any of the documents disclosed to them by the respondents;
iii) the respondents were ordered to provide disclosure and inspection of copies of licences where the rights licensed include any of the patents in the MCP Pool (other than on the terms of the MCP Pool Licences) and copies of agreements entered into by the respondents or their affiliates to which patents or patent applications comprised in the MCP Pool or rights or interests therein were assigned.
As the judge observed, the order for disclosure from the respondents casts the net widely. Any licence which overlapped with the patents in the MCP Pool, even if only by a single patent, would have to be disclosed. It is clear that in making this order Mann J was conscious of a number of factors: see his judgment of 22 July 2020 [2020] EWHC 2177 (Pat). It was, absent other considerations, “unnecessary and excessive” to order wide disclosure of licences and other documents at this stage of the proceedings, given that it might all turn out to be unnecessary. However, there were other considerations, namely that the appellants were being required to formulate a positive case on FRAND, and the disclosure was necessary in order to enable them to do so. The disclosure would therefore be ordered, but subject to an obligation on the appellants to plead any case based on the documents clearly and with particularity. If they did not do so, the documents disclosed “can be parked thereafter”.
At the same CMC, Mann J established a confidentiality regime for the disclosure. Under this regime the parties could designate documents to one of three levels of confidentiality:
i) Attorney's Eyes Only (“AEO”): the parties cannot see or give instructions on the documents, which are only made available to external representatives (lawyers and experts) in the AEO Club;
ii) Highly Confidential Material (“HCM”): documents may be seen by the HCM Club, which includes the AEO Club and up to two representatives of each party, whose identity must be previously agreed;
iii) “Ordinary disclosure materials” governed by the CPR disclosure rules.
As will have been noticed, the AEO designation is misleading as the AEO Club includes the parties' experts, not just lawyers. Other cases have used the term “External eyes only” which is both more accurate and less transatlantic. I will nevertheless adopt AEO to avoid confusion, as that term has been adopted throughout the present case. The AEO Club was to consist of English qualified lawyers as well as independent experts. It specifically excluded employees of the receiving party. Either the receiving party or the disclosing party was permitted to apply to the court to resolve any dispute. There was no appeal from Mann J's creation of this three-tiered structure.
Under this regime, the respondents disclosed 115 documents...
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