Exploring a Patent's Essentiality to the HEVC Standard: A Retrospective View

In this article we proposes a method to quantitatively explore a patent's essentiality to a standard based on a given set of already claimed standard-essential patents (SEPs). The method begins by creating an expanded patent set through a citation-based process and then clustering the expanded patent set into groups within which patents have similar technologies. It then applies main path analysis to a selected technology group to uncover a critical potential SEP within the selected technology area. To demonstrate the proposed method, we take the case of SEPs related to the high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard, utilizing the given SEP data from the HEVC patent pool of MPEG LA and use patent data in the ITU declaration database to verify the results of the proposed method, which show that our method is able to explore a patent's essentiality. In practice, four contingent analyses can be conducted to further confirm the results: main path analysis upon each group, branch analysis on specific patents, supplementary patent information analysis, and claim analysis on critical potential SEPs. The proposed method can assist practitioners who are developing future standards or who are trying to identify SEPs for the purpose of business strategy and patent deployment.